| Opening and closing presented here. Recommended tactics can be read at the link, which all you military amateurs and professionals can much better judge than I. |
[NewsMax] The Regime of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro Is Facing 'Choke Points of Collapse'
Three U.S. warships, a nuclear submarine, and a Marine detachment are sliding into the Caribbean. By themselves they cannot bring down Nicolas Maduro, but they can blockade ports, choke resupply, and cripple the refineries and substations that keep his state on life support.
This is not mere signaling; it's escalation.
Across Venezuela’s border, Gustavo Petro has suspended extraditions, voided arrest warrants for drug lords, and bound Colombia's institutions closer to Caracas.
Maduro now speaks openly of uniting both militaries — a narco-political axis taking shape in real time.
To wait is to let that axis harden.
To act while Venezuela’s forces remain brittle and fuel-starved is to strike when the cost is lowest and the effect most decisive.
On paper the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, assessed at around 120–130,000 active personnel, retain the appearance of a conventional military.
In reality, they are hollow at the core, structured more to preserve the regime than to defend the state. The Army makes this clearest.
Armored and mechanized formations are concentrated not along viable approach corridors but in the Maracay-Valencia axis, positioned to secure the capital region.
The T-72B1V fleet, delivered by Russia, constitutes the notional strike force, with legacy AMX-30Vs still lingering in reserve.
Yet sanctions, spares scarcity, and accumulated maintenance debt mean that a meaningful fraction of these inventories is non-mission-capable at any given time.
Even the serviceable hulls remain effectively tethered to central depots and to a road network where a single collapsed bridge can immobilize entire columns.
In the Llanos the mismatch between equipment and terrain is even starker: tracked armor bogs down in seasonal floods, wheeled vehicles are restricted to a thin lattice of paved roads, and maneuver becomes canalized for months at a time.
The lived geography of Apure’s plains ensures that hydrology immobilizes Venezuelan forces more reliably than any opposing fire plan.
The Air Force, though more visible in parades and flyovers, suffers the same structural fragility. Its combat wing rests on three pillars: Su-30MK2s at Barcelona, an aging cadre of U.S.-supplied F-16A/Bs at Maracay, and Chinese K-8 trainers sometimes pressed into light-attack roles.
The Su-30s were meant to symbolize a leap into modernity, yet sustained flight operations consume tons of fuel per hour and depend on refining and distribution systems that Venezuela cannot keep reliably online.
The force also lacks modern enablers: there is no publicly evidenced AWACS, no reliable tanker fleet, and no robust spares pipeline.
Even when Russia provides episodic support, availability rates remain low. What exists on paper is not what can be flown in the air.
Fuel is the ceiling that defines all. Each Su-30 patrol demands steady kerosene throughput that the Paraguaná refining system — Amuay and Cardón — can rarely provide.
For years the complex has lurched from fire to blackout, forcing shutdowns that ripple into prolonged aviation-fuel scarcity.
As a result, the Air Force is constrained less by pilot hours than by refinery uptime and trucking stability.
The Navy has collapsed still further, reduced to little more than a symbolic flotilla.
The Mariscal Sucre frigates lie inactive, with one dismantled entirely, while the service relies on Guaiquerí-class OPVs and smaller Guaicamacuto-class patrol craft.
These vessels can show the flag, interdict smugglers, and participate in sovereignty displays such as the recent Guyana crisis, but they lack the sensors, magazines, and depth of a combat fleet. They float, but they do not fight.
The deeper pathology is political.
Under Chávez and Maduro the officer corps ballooned far beyond operational necessity, with promotion tied to loyalty rather than competence.
Procurement became a form of patronage: Russian armor and Chinese systems arrived in impressive quantities on paper, but sustainment pipelines never matched the headlines.
Units routinely cannibalize vehicles just to keep a few operational.
Western platforms — most visibly the F-16s and Italian naval systems — were orphaned by sanctions, while Russian technical support arrives episodically and is directed toward prestige systems.
The result is a force of symbols without depth: fleets that cannot regenerate, designed less to fight for the state than to guard the regime center.
Beneath these institutional distortions lies the more elemental vulnerability of logistics. Venezuela’s constraint is not manpower or hardware but the fuel required to move and sustain them.
Civilian rationing has long since penetrated the barracks: in 2019 Lara capped purchases at thirty liters per week, Caracas later limited subsidized sales to around 120 liters per month, and border states like Zulia and Táchira have faced recurring outages.
Collapse can be measured against thresholds.
If the Su-30 fleet drops below four flyable aircraft, nationwide air defense becomes irrelevant. If refinery throughput remains under 80,000 barrels per day for 45 days, Caracas faces unmanageable fuel shortages.
If blackouts in Caracas extend beyond ninety-six hours, colectivos abandon regime duties to protect their families.
And if convoys across the Urdaneta Bridge are interdicted for 10 consecutive days, Zulia’s brigades become combat-ineffective.
These are not abstractions but empirical markers of systemic unraveling — the military, infrastructural, and social strands of the Venezuelan state collapsing in sequence.
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