Aircraft carrier moves into the Caribbean as U.S. confronts Venezuela

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, moved into the Caribbean region on Tuesday, adding to the capability of the United States to strike boats suspected of carrying drugs or targets on land in Venezuela as the Trump administration weighs further military steps aimed at ousting the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

In a statement, the Navy would identify the location of the Ford and its three accompanying warships only as being in the western Atlantic. But a senior military official said the vessels had moved into the Caribbean region, nearly three weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly ordered the carrier to leave the eastern Mediterranean Sea and rush to the waters off Latin America in a substantial escalation of U.S. military might in the area.

News of the Ford’s arrival came a day after Hegseth announced that six people had been killed Sunday in two more strikes on boats that he said were smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The latest strikes raised the death toll in the campaign to 76 people in 19 attacks in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea since early September.

The arrival of the Ford and three missile-firing Navy destroyers adds about 5,500 military personnel to a force of 10,000 troops already in the region, roughly half ashore in Puerto Rico and half aboard eight warships. With more than 15,000 military personnel, the U.S. buildup is the largest in the region in decades.

Aircraft carriers have toured the waters in the Caribbean and off Latin America before, on what the Navy calls “goodwill” tours. But cutting short the Ford’s scheduled deployment in the Mediterranean by several months and redirecting it to Latin America for a possible combat mission is highly unusual, current and former Navy officials said.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. “forces will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere.”

Trump administration officials have provided little evidence for their claims that the people killed on the boats were smuggling narcotics. The officials say the boats have been in international waters.

A wide range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have denounced the killings as illegal because the U.S. military is not allowed to intentionally target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence, even those suspected of being criminals. The administration says the strikes are lawful because President Donald Trump has “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels.

Legal specialists are not the only ones challenging the administration’s rationale. Britain has stopped sharing intelligence with the United States about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in the U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, according to a senior Western official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic and intelligence matters.

The United States gathers intelligence from a panoply of sources, so the loss of information from Britain will not seriously undercut U.S. operations in the region, several U.S. officials said.

But Britain’s decision, reported earlier by CNN, marks a significant departure from one of its closest allies and underscores the breadth of skepticism surrounding the administration’s legal rationale for the strikes.

For decades, Britain, which controls several territories in Caribbean, has provided intelligence to the U.S. to help identify vessels suspected of carrying drugs. Coast Guard crews could then act on that information to stop suspicious vessels, board them, seize any illicit drugs and detain the crews.

But soon after the first U.S. strikes in early September, Britain suspended the flow of intelligence to the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force South, stationed in Key West, Florida, that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade, the senior Western official said.

The Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday that it did not discuss intelligence matters.

The arrival of the Ford, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters, has implications beyond U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats.

The Trump administration also has developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, including direct attacks on military units that protect Maduro and moves to seize control of the country’s oil fields, according to multiple U.S. officials.

Maduro has been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges, and the U.S. is offering a $50 million reward for his capture. Trump administration officials maintain that the Venezuelan is not a foreign leader but a “fugitive from American justice,” as Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and interim national security adviser, has put it.

Trump has yet to make a decision about how or whether to proceed. Officials said Trump was reluctant to approve operations that may place U.S. troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisers are pressing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Maduro from power.

With the aircraft carrier now on station, administration officials acknowledge that pressure will build to use the threat of force to broker some kind of diplomatic deal to remove Maduro. Or to use the vast firepower of the carrier, and the military forces around it, to do so.

Once on station in a new theater, Navy officials said, it typically takes the carrier-based attack planes only a few days to refresh their takeoff and landing operations.