Summarizer

Nah, Kim will now wet his bed for weeks. If any dictator willing to deliberately kill thousands for nothing knew he could wake up in a chopper the world would have been a better place.

From where would an hypothetical operation to kidnap Kim be launched? Likely from SK or Japan, right? So yes, China could retaliate. The operation against Maduro was launched from countries in the region aligned with the US.

From bgp hijacking? Almost certainly not. It would probably rule out the type of decapitation strike the US did, but bgp hijacking is way way below on the escalation ladder.

Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country. The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.

Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same.

Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything.

Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either.

Honestly from what we learned in the earlier attacks on Iran the USA probably could take a quick trip over to Tehran and grab the Ayatollah.

I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location. The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.

>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.

>Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat. A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation. Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small. >Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did. Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.

I think "this kind of operation" refers to the entire "we bombed your capital and stole your President" thing, not just the cyber component of it. It seems extraordinarily unlikely we'd have attempted such a thing if Venezuela had nukes.

Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help.

There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say. And frankly, the Venezuelan military is absolutely tiny and has been facing the same economic issues as the rest of the country. They have 24 F-16s, but rumor is none of them work anymore, maybe some SU-30s, but those would be shot down pretty much as soon as they were scrambled. There was pretty heavy bombing before hand to knock out AA. And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there; blowing up a graveyard for shits and giggles on an op is some shit even cartels have a little bit more respect than to do. IDK, the whole thing seems like equally could have been mostly what it says on the tin, with no more than the normal intelligence HUMINT/SIGINT/*INT cloak and dagger crap to have the right intelligence.

I think by "this kind of operation" he means extrajudicially removing a sitting president (legitimate or not) of another country for trial elsewhere. Not cyber attack or espionage.

the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia. We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes. Using nukes isn't just a matter of pressing a button, it involves a lot of people and processes - thus any significant opposition inside the force or just widespread sabotage will make it unusable.

It strikes me as completely possible that the exit was negotiated. The fact that they knew his exact location and "luckily" nabbed him right before he went into some kind of panic room / bunker is certainly... something. But it seems equally likely to me that he was sold out by somebody in the VZ government/military. And that the paltry military resistance was because they saw direct confrontation with the US as suicidal.

I think it is kind of both - the exit was ultimately negotiated because most of the VZ government/military either sold him or at least abandoned him and shown no interest in any further support of him.

There is not really any reason to conclude that "american tech" was responsible for this attack. If anything, given all the sanctions Venezuela was under and how friendly they are with china, i would be surprised if they were using american tech in their infrastructure. [Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]

There were reports they had considered Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I wonder if it was far enough along that you could see similar BGP anomalies around those times.

Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA. While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.

The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel.

P.S.: In that scenario, it's quite possible for both groups of conspirators to benefit from denying it and saber-rattling: * The (remaining) Venezuelan government gets to point to Big Evil America to unify (or crack-down-upon) an unhappy public, and they avoid being personally tarred as unpatriotic. * Trump et al. get to "wag the dog" as distraction from crimes and mismanagement back home.

we don't really have a way to tell if it was even real, it would actually be a rather trivial operation for the government during those times and the entire thing could have just been overplayed and/or involved collaboration from all sides. none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess.

General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques.

The unquestioning logistical and intelligence support from the US military is truly formidable, and probably expensive.

The only anomaly was military. As far as I can tell, Venezuela's AD was shut down, or told to shut down. Didn't the US use Chinooks? They're supposed to be loud. And AD didn't take even one out. If Venezuela as corrupt as most socialist countries, I have no doubt that someone in his inner circle gave him up. Back in the days of our version of socialism we had Indian politicians selling out for $100K, leave alone $50M.