U.S. President Donald Trump’s obsession with televised army spectacles and fast successes is reinforcing a harmful bias towards precision strikes over the sustained capabilities wanted for a future great-power battle.
In a daybreak raid on Jan. 3, U.S. Delta Pressure commandos, backed by greater than 150 plane, executed a precision strike deep inside Caracas to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Leveraging cyber and digital warfare that plunged the capital into darkness and blinded air defenses, U.S. forces breached the closely fortified Fort Tiuna army advanced, secured Maduro and his spouse from their secure room, and transported them by way of helicopter to a ready warship within the Caribbean. The operation concluded and not using a single U.S. fatality, delivering the Venezuelan chief to federal custody in New York Metropolis to face narcoterrorism expenses.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s obsession with televised army spectacles and fast successes is reinforcing a harmful bias towards precision strikes over the sustained capabilities wanted for a future great-power battle.
In a daybreak raid on Jan. 3, U.S. Delta Pressure commandos, backed by greater than 150 plane, executed a precision strike deep inside Caracas to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Leveraging cyber and digital warfare that plunged the capital into darkness and blinded air defenses, U.S. forces breached the closely fortified Fort Tiuna army advanced, secured Maduro and his spouse from their secure room, and transported them by way of helicopter to a ready warship within the Caribbean. The operation concluded and not using a single U.S. fatality, delivering the Venezuelan chief to federal custody in New York Metropolis to face narcoterrorism expenses.
Trump adopted the operation stay from the White Home. “I watched it, actually, like I used to be watching a tv present,” he advised Fox Information, his enthusiasm palpable.
The raid was certainly a shocking show of U.S. army functionality. Few forces worldwide may conduct such a posh operation. (It will hardly have escaped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s consideration that his personal tried airborne raid to decapitate the Ukrainian management crashed and burned in February 2022.) But the raid’s very success poses a strategic hazard: It reinforces a U.S. army tradition excessively targeted on precision strikes and particular operations raids. A bias inherited from twenty years of counterterrorism operations has now been amplified by a commander in chief who craves television-ready army spectacles.
Trump, a product of actuality tv who relishes his function as a wartime president, represents a harmful convergence of political incentive and operational functionality. Excessive-risk, camera-ready raids and strikes with minimal U.S. casualties and fast, beautiful successes are precisely what this commander in chief calls for. Latest U.S. army actions—strikes in opposition to Iranian targets, operations in opposition to the Islamic State in Nigeria, and now the Venezuela raid—present a gentle stream of such successes, creating an unhealthy suggestions loop between presidential predilection and army motion.
In June 2025, Trump ordered B-2 stealth bombers to strike three Iranian nuclear amenities with 30,000-pound bunker busters—an escalation that Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to as a “outstanding army achievement” whilst questions on strategic outcomes remained unanswered. The sample persists: The Venezuela raid, too, was tactically spectacular however strategically ambiguous.
This preponderance of precision strike operations creates a strategic tradition favoring fast tactical fixes over long-term planning. It’s a legacy of the so-called world battle on terror, the place U.S. particular operations forces usually carried out raids and strikes with tactical brilliance however negligible strategic impact. The USA killed Osama bin Laden, but it nonetheless misplaced its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tactical success meant little within the absence of strategic coherence.
The U.S. army’s perfection of the precision strike regime—the delicate integration of long-range munitions with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to precisely establish and hit targets—has additional amplified this bias.
What emerges is what I describe in my ebook How the USA Would Battle China because the “strike-as-strategy” paradox: the substitution of spectacular tactical actions for complete strategic design. Underneath Trump, this tendency is bolstered by a political tradition that calls for televised shows of army prowess.
The Maduro raid will encourage the damaging notion that daring operations and decapitation strikes will help conclude a significant battle. Capturing or killing an enemy chief, the idea goes, will set off chaos and collapse resistance. Historical past, nevertheless, suggests in any other case. The focused killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani in 2020, whereas considerably degrading Quds Pressure effectiveness and contributing to subsequent setbacks for Tehran’s proxies within the area, didn’t completely alter Iran’s aggressive posture or deter its continued pursuit of affect by way of proxy militias. Israel’s elimination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, regardless of its tactical brilliance, has not introduced peace. In some situations, a decapitation strike may unleash harmful penalties: In opposition to a nuclear-armed energy, it dangers catastrophic vertical escalation.
The raid additionally provides U.S. political leaders a false sense of army readiness. Whereas the operation represents an superior show of functionality unmatched by any peer competitor, this very dominance may paradoxically make Washington much less ready for a sustained, large-scale, standard battle.
Giant-scale standard warfare calls for strategic depth: sturdy industrial mobilization, sustainable logistics, and power regeneration capabilities. In a great-power battle, particular operations and precision strikes can form the battlefield, however they can not win such wars. Russia’s and Ukraine’s expertise in their battle demonstrates this clearly—each side’ particular operations forces, whereas precious, suffered heavy casualties and proved far much less decisive in high-intensity standard fight than counterinsurgency and different operations they have been designed for.
What wins standard wars is the boring stuff that makes poor tv on Fox Information: the power to quickly deploy and maintain giant forces throughout theaters, preserve advanced provide chains underneath hearth, and regenerate fight energy after absorbing losses. Latest workout routines testing U.S. functionality to surge forces into European and Asian theaters—together with Defender 25 in Europe and Reforpac within the Pacific—proceed to show issues about personnel shortages, deployment timelines, and the power to maintain large-scale operations throughout a number of theaters concurrently.
In my conversations with them, U.S. army planners expressed deep concern concerning the capability to surge forces in sufficient numbers to each European and Asian theaters of operations.
These unglamorous however important capabilities atrophy when army and strategic cultures change into excessively oriented towards technologically refined however strategically restricted precision operations. In a significant battle with China, U.S. forces may run out of precision strike capabilities inside days. In battle sport simulations of a Taiwan Strait situation, U.S. forces expended their complete world stock of long-range anti-ship missiles—roughly 450—through the first week of combating.
As congressional leaders have warned, “If we have been in a short-term battle, it might be short-term as a result of we don’t have sufficient munitions to maintain a long-term struggle.”
Nice-power warfare additionally requires political resilience to soak up prices—in casualties, main gear losses, financial upheaval, and potential destruction on the house entrance—over prolonged intervals. Above all, battle requires a coherent operational idea that hyperlinks battlefield goals to favorable political outcomes. These capacities erode when technique turns into confused with fast, showy successes.
Israel’s expertise gives a cautionary parallel. Regardless of its army hegemony within the Center East and talent to conduct spectacular operations—such because the pager assaults in opposition to Hezbollah and strikes degrading Iranian capabilities—peace eludes Israel. Tactical dominance has not translated into strategic success. Precision and spectacle can not substitute for a coherent idea of success on the strategic and political ranges.
Deterring future great-power battle requires a reputable idea of victory in opposition to peer adversaries. Such a idea calls for long-term political dedication, clear alignment between operational goals and political objectives, and the means adequate to attain each. It requires accepting that battle with China or Russia wouldn’t resemble the Venezuela raid—no fast decapitation, no clear conclusion, and no made-for-television ending.
The raid on Caracas demonstrated extraordinary tactical proficiency. However the USA’ strategic problem just isn’t conducting good raids on regional dictators. It’s how one can deter great-power battle—and, if deterrence fails, how one can prevail in a sustained standard battle in opposition to an adversary with nuclear weapons, refined air defenses, and a militarized industrial economic system able to protracted battle.
Precision strikes and daring raids stay precious army instruments. However they can not change into substitutes for the unglamorous, politically tough work of constructing and sustaining the traditional army energy essential for great-power competitors. Trump’s actuality tv presidency dangers complicated army theater with real preparedness. Whereas the Venezuela raid makes compelling tv, successful the USA’ subsequent battle would require rather more than that.
