This episode of the Mission Matters podcast features a conversation between Shield Capital Managing Partner Philip Bilden and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (ret.) on the recent U.S. operation in Venezuela. This episode covers everything from:
The operational complexity of modern joint warfare and the role of commercial technology
Why Venezuela has become a key piece of U.S strategy in the Western Hemisphere
What the operation signals to China, Russia, and other adversaries about U.S. resolve and deterrence.
And more
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, the Shield Capital website, or right here on Substack.
As always, please let us know your thoughts, and please let us know if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of national security and commercial technology. Tune in next month for our next episode!
Lisa 00:36
Thank you for making the time to join this timely discussion of the recent U.S. military action in Venezuela. We’re honored to have with us today SHIELD’s senior advisor and the former National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, U.S. Army General H.R. McMaster. General McMaster has a distinguished four-decade career as a U.S. Army officer, national security expert, and presidential advisor. He served as the 25th U.S. National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018, where he led the National Security Council and advised President Trump on U.S. national security strategy. During his 34-year Army career, following his commissioning from West Point, he held multiple senior command and leadership roles. General McMaster commanded combat operations, including Combined Joint Interagency Task Force operations in Afghanistan, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, and the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment during Operation Desert Storm. He is the recipient of numerous service awards. I could go on and on, but they do include the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart. Those are stories that we will get out of him at the next limited partner annual meeting. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor of Science from West Point. General McMaster is a prolific author and historian and currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. We’re grateful to have his esteemed counsel and support at SHIELD, where the mission matters. And now it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Phillip Bilden, SHIELD founder and managing partner, who will help moderate the discussion today.
Philip 02:14
Thank you very much, Lisa. I also echo your thanks to the SHIELD investors and friends of the firm, our advisors and partners who have helped us build the firm that we have, and certainly our esteemed senior advisor and friend, General H.R. McMaster. H.R., very good to see you. I know that you’re on the Pacific Coast and had to wake up early today. You’ve been very busy since this news broke on Saturday. Amidst your other duties, thank you so much for being here for the SHIELD webinar.
LTG McMaster 02:43
Hey, Phillip and Lisa, what a privilege it is to be part of the SHIELD team and to be with you today as well. It’s a fantastic firm with a mission that I’m so excited about, and the vision you all had years ago to put this together. I think it’s already having a huge impact on our national security. Any time for you guys.
Philip 03:01
Thank you. And you have been there from the very inception of the firm as one of our advisors, helping us think through issues like we are dealing with today, which we are going to be discussing: the relevance of the technologies that SHIELD has been supporting and the companies that bring these capabilities to the warfighters, to our intelligence community, etc. Maybe that is where we should start. H.R., I am actually two miles north of Mar-a-Lago, where a lot of this activity took place over the weekend. You are no stranger to Mar-a-Lago in your duties with the President when you started out in 2017 as his National Security Advisor. But operationally, what was executed in the zero-dark hours Saturday morning? How would you assess this, just on a simple scale, one to ten, in terms of the complexity and ultimately the execution, all the planning that went into that in terms of its operational performance? How would you assess that?
LTG. McMaster 04:07
Hey, Philip, I will tell you, this is a ten in terms of degree of difficulty, if we are going to liken it to Olympic diving or something. And it was a ten score, I think, from all the judges. I mean, you have to look at the broad scale of preparation and then implementation and execution on the objective, on the X, and then the exfiltration. It was done so well, so professionally, and in a very difficult environment. It is Venezuela, which is the beneficiary, the recipient, of all kinds of assistance from the Cuban military and Cuba, Cuban secret police essentially, and intelligence. Russia and China have tried to help them perfect their technologically enabled surveillance and police state, and then you also have Iran active there. So getting into that denied environment, collecting the intelligence necessary to drive the planning, and then conducting that planning with so many different agencies and the joint force, this makes me think of the history of other interventions in the hemisphere, going back to Grenada, which was a successful operation but one that revealed a lot of disjointedness in our joint operations. We are so many orders of magnitude better now than we were then.
Then you look at the professionalism of the forces, from the suppression of enemy air defenses to the cyber activities and electromagnetic activities to blind the enemy as you get into the objective area. Just the number of aircraft conducting these electronic warfare missions and the suppression of air defense assets, and then responding immediately to any enemy fire and immediately suppressing that fire, is extraordinary. To have just one aircraft hit and that aircraft still be able to continue the mission is unbelievable. Just deconflicting the airspace was probably pretty amazing. And then the 1/60th coming in, you know their motto, the Special Operations Aviation Regiment, time on target plus or minus 30 seconds. Well, they did that. The timing was impeccable.
I think what you are seeing also, Phil, from the perspective of SHIELD and SHIELD investors, is that we are going to find out more and more that this operation was enabled by a combination of very highly classified government capabilities and a whole range of newly available commercial capabilities, from satellite imagery to RF collection. I am thinking of Hawkeye 360, for example, and then the big data analytical capabilities, the ability to fuse multiple sources of intelligence, and the cyber tools that allowed us to shut down cameras and shut down communications. So a fantastic operation. Degree of difficulty, ten, and I think the score is a ten.
Philip 07:16
Absolutely. Thank you for that. So this was a multi-jurisdictional, multi-agency combined effort that required an enormous amount of integration. Can you walk us through a little bit of the operational phases? The President did not just wake up after two years and decide that he was going after Maduro. This was in the works for several months. There were CIA human assets on the ground, monitoring through traditional espionage, augmented with technical means, drones, ISR capabilities, in order to get to the point where the President could give the order, which I think was before Christmas, that gave an operational window to our friend General Dan “Razin” Caine to pull the trigger and say, this is the go time. Can you walk us through that sequence a bit, H.R., and maybe focus on some of the elements of these technologies and capabilities that are so important to our emerging national security that we are supporting, how they played into the intelligence collection and then ultimately the extraction?
LTG. McMaster 08:26
Well, I think what you saw our intelligence community and the military give the President were multiple options. Of course, President Trump knew Venezuela was a problem in 2017. He actually said at the time that we were developing military options for Venezuela, when we really were not doing that, but he said it, I think, to try to coerce Maduro during that period. Maduro has become more and more of a threat since then, and I can imagine conversations that occurred very early in the Trump administration, especially with Secretary Rubio coming in, who has tracked hemispheric issues in such detail with his Senate staff. He is the most knowledgeable person on activities and the security and economic situation in the hemisphere. I relied heavily on his staff, actually we did. And Trump won for the Venezuela policy we put into place in 2017, as well as the 180-degree shift in Cuba policy away from the Obama administration and back toward maximum pressure on the Cuban army. So very early in the Trump administration, I am sure the order went out, “Hey, give the President options.” You have to put an infrastructure in place to do that. As you mentioned, you have to get intelligence collection capabilities, human intelligence capabilities, and Title 50 intelligence agency operational capabilities in place. I am sure a lot of that was going on that we will probably never hear about, activities aimed at setting conditions for the raid to extricate Maduro, his wife, and others. Then a range of military capabilities were put together. They did not just come together; they had to organize and put a task force together. I think they probably built a mock-up of the palace somewhere and rehearsed this multiple times across operational distances. That preparation phase probably began soon after President Trump’s inauguration. Then you had the organization and rehearsal phase when Maduro was intransigent. There were some initial efforts, and this is a pattern with President Trump. He wants a deal, he always wants a deal, so he tries the deal first, and when he gets stiff-armed, he considers other options. The rehearsals and organization, I think, began around November and December. These great servicemen and women involved probably did not really have a Christmas. You saw the staging that was happening, some of it in Florida, some in Puerto Rico, and other places. The maritime task force played such an important role in this operation. The preparation phase went through December, and then you are teeing up the option for the President. “Mr. President, here is what we have planned.” President Trump likes to get into the details. Just like he will walk around a construction site for one of his hotels, he wants to talk to people with different perspectives and learn more about it. One thing about President Trump is that he is willing to take a risky decision. I cannot share details, but there were multiple times I brought him an operation involving saving U.S. citizens from a dangerous situation. I would lay out the risks, the potential for failure, and the costs associated with that, and he would ask, “Is it the right thing to do?” I would say yes, and he would say, “Okay, do it, General, do it.” Oftentimes I would call back to the agency and say the President approved it, and they would respond, “Really? That can’t be true. Nobody makes a decision that fast.” I think he probably made this decision based on the advice he was getting, including from his principal military advisor, Dan Caine, a former SHIELD guy for a brief period of time and an amazing officer. Then you had the execution, and now we are in the aftermath.
Philip 12:38
Yeah, absolutely. How did this extraordinary military operation maintain operational security, or OpSec? I mean, you’ve got a flotilla of maritime assets, the Gerald Ford, the Iwo Jima, several DDGs, and other support vessels. It was no surprise that there was a buildup. And then, of course, there was the campaign against the drug boats that have been taken out by aerial means and with kinetic force. So maintaining that operational surprise element is very, very challenging, particularly when you have numerous interagency participants. It’s extraordinary. There’s no leak, no nothing. And as we know, the extraction took place in the wee hours on a Saturday, right after the New Year’s holidays, with Delta Force entering and breaching a highly secure Venezuelan military base where Maduro and his wife happened to be at that time. How do you do that? And across—
LTG. McMaster 13:39
—considerable distances, where I’m sure there was significant aerial refueling going on. Aerial refueling of rotor-wing aircraft, which is not an easy task, and operating off the Iwo Jima, which is the amphib that was committed. I think, Phil, this is a really important question because of the ubiquity of surveillance capabilities, low Earth orbit capabilities, RF collection capabilities. Really, it’s almost as if everything you do is visible everywhere. So what you have to do very early in an operation is desensitize your adversary. Sadly, this would be concerning for us. This is what China is doing right now around Taiwan. How will you know when it’s a real Taiwan invasion, or is it just another one of these live-fire exercises?
So having the maritime task force and the aerial activity that we had in the Caribbean prior, that was part of the desensitization. Then deception plays a big role. Deception can be public statements that you make that might indicate that you’re not really looking at this, that you’re looking at other potential options, and so forth. And you remember the President actually announced the clandestine strike on a port facility before that. But all this, I think, was actually beneficial because it indicated that our approach to what we were going to do militarily was pretty narrowly circumscribed and would really only be in the coastal area or involving these narcotics trafficking boats.
So noise was high, deception, and then you have to go into the blind phase. This is where, I think, we have to really think in terms of future war. We have to be able to blind and deceive our enemies. The reason why the situation in Ukraine is so stagnant is because, with the capabilities that both sides have there, you can’t conduct a sustained offensive operation due to the transparency of the battlefield combined with what each side has in terms of long-range precision strike capabilities, FPV drones, and so forth.
Then you’re into the blind phase, and this is something we’ll probably learn about maybe 30 or 40 years from now in terms of exactly what happened. But I think the implication is that we have pretty considerable offensive cyber capabilities, similar to those that the IDF displayed in the attack against Iran, and we probably assisted with that as well. So the importance of warfare across all domains, the space assets, the electromagnetic assets, the aerospace, the maritime, and of course all the set conditions for what happened on land during that successful raid.
Philip 16:35
Thank you. We’ve talked a lot about unmanned systems and drones. We’ve seen this on display in Europe with Russia and Ukraine and these first-person viewing capabilities, which are pretty extraordinary. It’s like playing a video game, but the consequences are unfortunately very deadly. There was a fair bit of aerial surveillance with drones before the operation and after the operation. But interestingly, what had the impact was 150 fixed-wing and rotary-wing assets, some of which were from our service, the Army, that were in the fight. But they were assisted by the anti-aircraft assets that were supplied, I believe, by the Russians and the Chinese. Those were blinded and those were taken out. How do you think they did that? Because that was similar to what happened in Iran with Operation Midnight Hammer just months ago.
LTG. McMaster 17:38
We had command of the airspace. Yeah, absolutely. There were a range of capabilities that were employed. A lot has been mentioned about electromagnetic effects, and I am sure cyber was employed there as well against UAS capabilities. By the way, it is worth mentioning that there is an Iranian Shahed drone factory in Venezuela. That is part of the problem. Part of the problem with Venezuela that brought us there was how Venezuela had become a platform for our adversaries in the region. Also, with the advanced radar capabilities that we have on our manned aircraft, everything from Army Apache Longbows to F-35s and F-16s, oftentimes it is manned aircraft that are the best counter to these unmanned systems. Your ability to command and control with our aerial command and control platforms, based on the common visibility or picture of the airspace, is critical. I do not think really anybody else can do that but us right now, Philip, in terms of the visibility and the ability to bring multiple platforms to bear. The other time you saw this from a defensive perspective was in the highly successful defense of Israel against the massive ballistic missile and drone assault that Iran launched. It was almost completely defeated. That was tiered and layered air defense, involving, as you are mentioning, manned and unmanned systems, aerial and ground systems. I think that is the answer in the future. In warfare, there is always a countermeasure. So what you need is a range of capabilities. You can play the game of rock paper scissors, but you have to have all three to be able to seize and retain the initiative and to create conditions, like we created across multiple domains, to affect a highly complicated raid like that or any other military operation.
Philip 19:38
Well, this is exactly why SHIELD exists, to stay ahead of those technologies that our adversaries are able to develop on their own, reverse engineer, or steal through cyber means, through espionage, or what have you. This rock paper scissors dynamic, staying ahead of adversary capabilities, really drives so much of what we do from a mission standpoint, quite apart from the fact that it is also going to be a very important economic activity. This is where the future is going. Thank you for that operational breakdown. That is extremely helpful for setting the table for some of the geopolitical issues which you have spent most of your career working on, in and out of uniform, in the Oval Office advising the president, thinking about and trying to create a more stable environment for the United States, trying to avoid unnecessary escalation where that is prudent and feasible, but also creating strategic deterrence. That means trying to get the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans not to do things that we do not want them to do. Let us start in the region, and maybe even go back to when you were national security advisor. What has really changed in Venezuela specifically, and then more broadly in Latin America, from 2017 and 2018 at the beginning of the first Trump administration to now? Where did it get to the point where the president felt compelled to actually go do an extraction of a sitting, if not illegitimate, head of state.
LTG. McMaster 21:16
Well, there’s a lot of continuity. I remember a conversation with President Trump, with a number of other people in the Oval Office, and he said, “General, General, why don’t we just bomb them?” And I was like, “Well, who do you have in mind?” He said, “The labs. The labs in Mexico.” People were shocked. I was with the President multiple times a day, every day, so this is the way he thinks. He thinks out loud, and he’s contrarian and disruptive. That can all be positive at times, but people were kind of freaked out about that. So I huddled with them outside the Oval Office and said, “Hey, you know what he’s saying? What he’s saying is that 100,000 Americans are dying of fentanyl poisoning every year, and what we’re doing now isn’t working. He wants options. He wants options.” The narcotics part of this was always on his mind. What has happened is that with the Cartel de la Solace, Venezuela has gotten deeply involved with the Mexican cartels and deeply involved with the Colombian cartels. He’s a source of strength and support for them in a couple of ways. First of all, it’s good to have a nation-state on your side because you can issue false documents, you can do all sorts of things to provide them with cover, and you can provide your aircraft for them, for example. In Colombia’s case, you can provide the trafficking route to evade our interdiction. He was doing all this, and guess what, he was getting a huge cut for it. That helped him because now he had more cash flow. That circumvents our sanctions and allows him to sustain the criminalized patronage network that keeps him in power, this organized crime network. The other thing that’s changed since 2017 is that he’s provided more and more support for what I would call far-left progressive dictatorships in the region, as well as far-left political parties, with his money. I don’t have the data for this, but I hear this from people in the region. I believe it was a huge source of funding for Petro, for de Silva in Brazil, and for AMLO, and for the far-left party in Mexico as well. He was a big part of this pink wave that also affected Peru and Chile, and it was anti-American. He was providing money to build an anti-American coalition such that the balance of power in the hemisphere had shifted dramatically against us since 2017, 2018, and 2020, because the Biden administration, I mean some of them were actually kind of sympathetic to these guys. I’m not a partisan person, but if you think about the shift in policy between the Obama administration and the Trump administration, President Biden went back to the Obama administration approach. Remember President Obama did the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game. There was this idea that opening up to them and being more tolerant would work, when in fact these regimes remained very hostile to the United States and were providing platforms for China, Russia, and Iran. There’s also an economic dimension to this. Remember the announcement of the Peruvian port and mineral development, for example, and the deepening ties in Argentina. That could shift back now, because if you’re a country in the Western Hemisphere and you’re thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ll take that Chinese money, I’ll take that Chinese infrastructure,” you might be aware they’re going to use it for coercive purposes and trap you in debt, but now you also have to ask whether you’re going to lose all those investments when the U.S. decides enough is enough. I think the dynamic has shifted favorably in that regard. But to answer your question, there have been big increases in the Cartel de la Solace and their connections to other cartels, the use of Venezuela as a platform for Iran, China, and Russia in the region, and the degree to which Maduro took upstream support from China, Russia, and Iran and distributed downstream support to keep the Cuban army in power in Cuba and to get Daniel Ortega back into power in Nicaragua. Nobody knows this better than Rubio, and I think he saw Venezuela as the linchpin for anti-American influence and activities in the hemisphere. He’s right about that.
Philip 25:58
And he is dual hatted. He had your former hat, or he has your former hat, as NSA advisor, but also Secretary of State, and I think a few other titles have been thrown at him, because he is going to be running Venezuela soon as well. So you have answered a very important question. Why Venezuela? Why Maduro now, as opposed to, say, going after cartels in Mexico, closer to our border, if eliminating narco-terrorism and transnational cartels was the key objective? So let’s talk a little bit about what the key objectives were, and then what the strategic impact is going to be, both in the region but also in Asia and back in Europe.
So the original justification, and this is only a few days old, was that the elimination effort is a judicial effort for an indicted felon under U.S. law to be repatriated to the United States forcibly to face U.S. justice for criminal activity involving transportation and all types of things that narco-terrorists do. Then, as we go into the news cycle of the week, we start hearing the President mention the oil factor and the implications of that. There have been references to the Cuban security presence. There have been references to terrorist ties to Hezbollah. There have been references to the Iranians having activities. There are Russian advisors currently in Venezuela. So there are numerous points that really do not have a direct link to the narco-judicial effort, but certainly are within U.S. strategic interest. You would not want this festering in your hemisphere, on your back door. So can you help us really understand what those objectives were?
LTG. McMaster 27:59
Yeah, well, you know, this is where I think the administration gets, it gets like a grade of improve. How about communicating clearly what the objective is? And I think really what it is, based on all these statements, is kind of all of the above. I would put it under the heading of ensuring that Venezuela is no longer a host or a threat to the United States and our security interests in the hemisphere. That is the overall objective. There are certain components to that, and this is where now you have heard the administration talking about the behavior of the regime. We do not really care what regime is in power, as long as the behavior changes. And the behavior you hear about is everything you already mentioned, which is narcotics trafficking, being a platform for enemies and adversaries in the hemisphere, and the grievance associated with the seizure of infrastructure that was built with U.S. investment and denying profits to U.S. oil companies and so forth. And, of course, the subsidization of other hostile regimes with oil money and the cash flow from oil and narcotics. So those are all sub-objectives.
But I think the fundamentally flawed assumption that President Trump might be operating on is that he can get those outcomes without a change in the regime, and he is not going to get it. The reason is that there are limits to what you can achieve with coercive diplomacy. This is where President Trump has this dissonance between peace through strength, which you just saw with this operation, and an impulse toward retrenchment and really not getting involved in long-term efforts abroad, even in the near abroad here in the hemisphere. He tends to view these options through the lens of the searing experience of the Iraq War. In this way, he has inclinations that are quite similar to those of the Obama-Biden administrations.
The flaw in that thinking is that it is not Iraq. I think there is a misdiagnosis of the complications, the cost, and the length of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of what caused them. I think what caused them, in large measure, was our short-term approach to long-term problems. There was a Vietnam-style wrong lesson of saying we just do not want to do that, just get the hell out. What we did not focus on was how to consolidate military gains and get to a sustainable political outcome consistent with what brought us to those wars to begin with.
I think what we are seeing in Venezuela may be a replication, actually on a larger scale, because Venezuela is a much larger country in terms of population, of the Obama mistake in Libya. What the Obama administration did in Libya, in its effort to avoid what it perceived as the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration in Iraq, actually exceeded those mistakes by affecting a change in the regime and then doing nothing to consolidate those gains into a sustainable political outcome. What did you have? You had a continued war in Libya. You had a continued threat of jihadist terrorism. You had a huge migration crisis that funneled through Libya into Europe.
So I think what we are going to see here is a failure of coercive diplomacy, and the President will face a difficult choice of what more do you do. If you look at the leaders in Venezuela and what they are doing right now, they are using essentially brown shirts, I think they are called the colectivos, these brigades of thugs, to go after anybody who might be sympathetic to getting Maduro the hell out of there. They are going through people’s phones. They are increasing the number of political prisoners. They have about 900 political prisoners in Venezuela now.
So we have to be clear about what we are demanding. We have to be clear about how we are creating a sense of urgency among officials in this government, many of whom I know are criminals, indicted criminals. We also have to be clear about what kind of punishment we are willing to mete out to achieve our objectives. For these inducements to work, you have to convince the leadership in Venezuela that you are more committed to that change in behavior than they are to continuing it. They have profited a hell of a lot from it, and Venezuelans are not going to be kind to them if they leave their positions, because they have victimized them. Since Chavez took over in 1999, Venezuelans have been living this hell. Since around 2006, the economy has contracted by about 80 percent. They have driven eight million Venezuelans out of the country, about one-third of the population.
So I think there is overconfidence in the ability to affect meaningful change in the nature of the government and its behavior through just coercive means, or what we might call forceful persuasion.
Philip 33:29
So thank you for that, and for our listeners, I should point out that, H.R., you’re an esteemed historian. While in the Army, you wrote a seminal book on the lessons of Vietnam, which wasn’t career enhancing for a while until it became so. You really do have a wonderful historical perspective. And if it’s not regime change that we’re after, that the President is after, and instead it’s trying to get to better outcomes with the existing political leadership and the existing military leadership, what tools are in the toolbox to do that? I presume economics, oil, political isolation, cutting off ties to some of the adversaries that we want booted out of the region, out of Venezuela.
LTG. McMaster 34:19
Yeah, absolutely. So my colleague, Stephen Coughlin, who’s a hoot, talks like Joe Pesci. I said Joe like he has, he’s from the Bronx. But he says, hey, authoritarian regimes really need five things to stay in power. The first thing you need is cash flow. So what you see is the administration going after that, right, from the narcotics cash flow and the oil cash flow. The second thing you need is security forces. I think this is what our agents on the ground are working on overtime to try to splinter those security forces and to get enough of them, who maybe don’t have the most blood on their hands and aren’t the most corrupt, to break away and then to be part of creating the security space you need for a political transition. Because really, these regimes don’t have to be that strong, they just have to be stronger than any organized opposition. The third thing you need is stories to tell your people. Hey, it’s the Yankees, it’s the gringos, they’re creating all these problems. It’s not us. You need me. You need us to save you, the Chavistas to save you. So you’ve got to counter that. This is where I think we should be a lot more active, in the informational domain and in the battleground of perception. The fourth thing you need is control over life choices. That’s what they’ve done with these criminalized patronage networks. If you have a job in Venezuela, it’s because the state kind of controls it. The cash is flowing down through these pyramid-type structures, and your livelihood is at risk. So you’re incentivized to stick with the regime, because that’s all you really know, even though you’re impoverished. And then the final thing is you need an international system that will sustain that authoritarian regime to some extent. As you alluded to, Philip, that’s exactly what they’re working on from the outside in, isolating Maduro from external sources of strength and support. So how will this play out? We don’t know, but I think it’s going to take a long time. We’re not going to see a quick change here. Sadly, the opposition is fragmented. I wish the President had not made the comment about María Corina Machado, like, hey, she’s not that popular. What we should be doing is helping to bring that opposition together and say, hey, play together like they did in the last election. They did that extremely well. What happened is the opposition got 70 to 80 percent of the vote, and they were able to expose that. So I think what’s missing, and this is why Marco Rubio, I mean, he can’t do everything. You need a National Security Council staff process to coordinate and integrate across the departments and agencies and develop a more coherent strategy and policy at this point. That’s really what’s needed. You see elements of it, everything I’m talking about is out there, but what I don’t see is how these are integrated and how they’ll be evaluated based on measures of effectiveness that would then alert you, hey, maybe this isn’t working, we have to bring other options to the President. I think that lack of clarity is hurting us at this moment.
Philip 37:36
So it sounds like a bleeding-out strategy. It sounds like you’re not anticipating a sustained military operation, the proverbial boots on the ground, or a buildup that’s going to make it very clear that the United States is coming with all of its military might, not just for a decapitation of a leader, but, you know, taking out.
LTG. McMaster 37:56
Expecting the change like in Grenada, you know, where we had about 10,000 troops in Grenada but were going against, you know, 1,500 Cubans. You had, in a very small country, Panama. Panama is a country about one-tenth the size of Venezuela in population, and it’s about one-twelfth the size of Venezuela in landmass, and that was an operation of 30,000 troops to displace Noriega. But importantly, those troops gave you the ability to conduct all those activities necessary to consolidate those gains, right, to reform the police forces, to create a new police force under new leadership, which, by the way, was attacked by the old Noriega crew and had to fight them off at the main police station, with one of my friends, Colonel Jim Steele, in there issuing weapons from the arms room and fighting them off, because he was advising the new police force. We had to revise the judiciary there with them, help them revise it themselves, put an election process in place. There was an election about a year later in Panama.
So what does that political path look like? What does that security path of transition look like? There’s a lot of talk about the economic path to transition, bringing oil companies in, but it all has to come together, because without the security reform, without the political change, you’re not going to get the right conditions for revitalization of the economy, and the oil economy in particular. Going back even further, the Dominican Republic, 1965, Operation Power Pack, another very effective intervention, partnering with significant Dominican forces on the ground. How many troops did we put into the Dominican Republic? Forty-two thousand, you know, in ’65.
So I think the President might choke on the price of that, in terms of a massive U.S. intervention that’s sufficient not only to depose the Maduro regime, but then to begin to set security conditions for security sector reform efforts and getting a path toward reform of the judiciary and reform of the political process, to really restore sovereignty to the Venezuelan people. Now the good news is Venezuela has a tradition of constitutional democracy, so really you’re just restoring the old constitution, but it would take a significant effort to do it. And I think they’ve got to tee up this option for the President, because I think he’s going to try everything short of that before he considers that more direct option.
Philip 40:35
So we just this morning woke up to the news that an oil tanker off the northern coast of the UK, between the UK and Iceland, was seized and taken control of by the United States military. That’s just one of the elements. We’re going to chase down their cash flow. You mentioned the cash flow. So speaking from a business perspective, I can’t imagine too many oil executives, with the possible exception of Chevron, who are still there and operating, wanting to take a 30-year view on the multibillion-dollar investment required to bring that oil infrastructure capability back up so that sometime 10 years from now you’re generating reliable profits and have a stable operating political environment to do that. So that’s going to be one very interesting element.
But now let’s move to China and Russia in particular. The Chinese have had oil-for-cash agreements with the Venezuelans. They had a delegation two days before the operation. Some of them were here in Mar-a-Lago right after, because of sensitivities around that. So what is going to be the calculus for senior leadership of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping specifically, with this action that shows U.S. resolve, U.S. technical ability, and U.S. massive capabilities to execute on a very specific military operation, particularly on the heels of what we just saw with Midnight Hammer in Iran?
LTG. McMaster 42:24
I think what you’re going to see is China, Russia, and Cuba, as the local support there, working together to ensure that the U.S. fails in Venezuela and is unable to get a government in place that is friendly to the United States and welcoming to the vast Venezuelan diaspora to return and rebuild the country. So I think what you’re going to see is a sustained Russian effort to foil U.S. efforts in Venezuela, because this is tied to their broader competition with us. I wouldn’t be over the top on this, but Russia and China are at war with us now already. They really are at war with us right now, and they’re acting against us with hostile intent and trying to get away with as much as they can below the threshold that might elicit a concerted response from us. There’s a reason why the largest Russian embassy in the world is in Mexico City. It’s there because Russia wants to turn Mexico against us and use Mexico as a platform to subvert the United States. The reason China is trying to gain control of critical infrastructure and indebt countries in Latin America is really twofold. One is to displace U.S. influence not only in the Indo-Pacific but globally by creating new spheres of influence internationally. The other is to strengthen its exclusive grip on critical supply chains that it can use for coercive purposes, especially involving minerals, and also to address its major vulnerability from an energy perspective. This is a major geostrategic competition that’s playing out. The worst-case scenario is something we have to be concerned about, which is fragmentation in Venezuela and a sustained civil war in which the Russians, the Chinese, and the Cubans do everything they can to ensure that the U.S. fails to get a change in behavior, as we’re framing it now, meaning a change in the nature of the Venezuelan government such that it ceases its hostility to the United States and nations friendly to us in the hemisphere.
Philip 44:40
We’re going to open up the Q&A to our investors and friends who are participating, and H.R., I’ll share some of those questions with you, but let me get one rolling here. We’ve talked a little bit about Russia. We have an active war and conflict in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is someone you spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand, what drives his motivations, and the advice you were able to give to the president kept the United States out of having to adjudicate a territorial invasion that ultimately happened later under a different administration and after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. So the same question I asked regarding Xi Jinping, how is Vladimir Putin viewing this now?
LTG. McMaster 45:37
You know, I think, I hope it’s given him pause. But really, what has emboldened Russia, I think, with the massive reinvasion of Ukraine in 2022, as you already alluded to, was the perception of weakness associated with the disastrous, what I would describe as a self-defeating, humiliating, and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021. I think the overall lesson is that it is the perception of weakness that is provocative to this axis of aggressors. And what I think President Trump is facing now, again, which is much different from 2020 when he left office in 2021, is the degree to which this axis of aggressors has coalesced, largely based on their view that the West is weak, divided, and decadent. So I think what this raid shows is that we’re not weak, that we have the resolve to do things. Also, I think this raid, in combination with last year’s operation against the deep, buried nuclear sites in Iran on the back end of the IDF’s successful campaign, confirms that, hey, we’re not weak. But we are divided in their view. And, you know, the President’s comments about Denmark, you know, I mean, guys, I mean, Bill, stop scoring these own goals. The way you frame things, it all matters, because what we want to convey to China and Russia on the back end of this operation is, hey, we’re not weak, divided, and decadent. We’re unified. We’re unified on Ukraine as well. We’re unified on Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific. So anyway, I think there are some tremendous opportunities at this moment, Philip, because of the success of this operation. Again, the long-term prospects are not good. They’re going to be tough in Venezuela, but we could see it through if we want to, if we have the will to do it. But also, to show that we’re not divided, I think, is really important, because this axis of aggressors is actually quite weak at this moment, I believe. Russia’s economy is a disaster. Look at what’s going on in Iran. Their currency has utterly collapsed, the protests that are going on there. I was glad to see the President’s statement, hey, don’t go after the protesters, because they did set a record last year for the number of executions in Iran after the effective campaign against the regime and the nuclear and missile programs. And then, you know, they’re about to run out of water in Tehran. China has created huge vulnerabilities in their economy, in my view, in their race to surpass us. They have some coercive power over our economy, which was really stupid for us to give them. But I think the administration is working now to make those supply chains more resilient. I was really happy to see Secretary Bessent say, hey, we’re going to do this in two years. That’s kind of an American attitude on supply chain resilience. So, hey, we’re in this competition, and we need all hands on deck. So stop kicking Denmark in the ass. Let’s work together.
Philip 48:47
Friends, including some of our friends from that part of the world, on Denmark, in Denmark, Greenland, the Arctic. So what’s behind all of the rhetoric? Is it simply, is it? Why can’t we just have a friendly NATO transaction where we, the United States, supply a certain amount of personnel and capabilities in a treaty partnership with those in Greenland and Denmark? Why do you need to acquire it? Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free, so to speak.
LTG. McMaster 49:22
Yeah, it’s like 50,000 people, right? And so I think what is driving this in part, and this is, I think, a positive observation, is that as President Trump recognizes, even though his National Security Strategy was not as explicit as we were in 2017 about great power competition, he knows he’s facing China and Russia, these revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass. The part of the globe that is immensely strategically important is that connection through the Arctic. He’s looking at the map. He’s a real estate guy. It’s like, hey, that real estate is pretty important to our defense. And also, he has this agenda for hemispheric security, for homeland security, missile defense. You can’t have effective missile defense unless you defend against missiles coming over from Russia, over the Arctic, for example. He’s seen the first transnavigation of a Chinese commercial ship over the Arctic in the last couple of months, and the so-called exploration they’re doing up there. So I think he understands the importance of it.
But with so many things with President Trump, what he wants is great. Reciprocity in trade, deregulation, economic growth, energy dominance, burden sharing in defense, securing the border, let’s do it. That’s all great. But how he goes about it can be counterproductive. If I had his ear for a minute, I would say, hey, you’re big on sovereignty, which he is. If you go back to the UN speech we drafted for him in 2017, that was the theme. We respect national sovereignty, especially nations that respect the sovereignty of their people. So if you’re concerned about Greenland, you’re concerned about the subversion of Greenland’s sovereignty and Denmark’s sovereignty. Let’s be on the side of that. As you said, set the security conditions by going back to a Cold War–era footprint in Greenland and Iceland, for example, or in Alaska, for Arctic security.
And if you’re concerned about the Panama Canal, be on the side of Panamanian sovereignty. You’ve got a friendly government in Panama. Say, hey, we’re concerned that Chinese companies that are not going to respect your sovereignty are in control of this strategic location. We’re on the side of Panama, instead of saying we’re just going to take it over. So a lot of this is really about the messaging, which I think can be counterproductive. A lot of it is fueled, in part, by a nativist and neo-isolationist impulse. You might say, how does that work? How can you be isolationist, anti-interventionist, and yet say we might have a military option for Greenland? The reason is that it’s tied to hemispheric and homeland defense.
There are a number of people around the President, and everybody kind of knows who they are, who are actually more isolationist than him but also more interventionist than him, because they frame everything through hemispheric defense. They have this nostalgia, a misinterpretation of the John Quincy Adams speech. Think Quincy Institute, think Defense Priorities, think how the Heritage Foundation has been taken over in large measure by people with this worldview. I think it’s a warped and old-fashioned worldview, because the great moats of the Pacific and the Atlantic don’t do for us what they used to do in the age of hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, and everything else. So that’s where a lot of this comes from, that hemispheric priority. You can see the theme in the National Security Strategy, but essentially this interventionism grows out of a strain of nativism and retrenchment.
Philip 53:39
H.R., we have literally three minutes, and then I have to hand this over to Lisa, who’s going to wrap up in three minutes. Are you fundamentally more optimistic, less optimistic, or no change in your baseline about the state of American interests and the state of strategic deterrence vis-à-vis our competitors and adversaries today, versus when you were in office several years ago?
LTG. McMaster 54:09
You know, I’m more optimistic that we’re now on a better path than we were on several years ago. I’m also more pessimistic because I do think the axis of aggressors is still emboldened based on the perception of our weakness. They base that perception, really, on their belief that we are, again, weak, decadent, and divided within the alliance, which I mentioned, but also divided within our own society. So it’s the vitriolic nature of our political discourse, the tendency of political parties to oppose anything, even good ideas. You know, get rid of Maduro, how could that be bad, right, given what this guy’s done? They think those divisions are indicative of our imminent demise, when in fact I’m optimistic because I believe our democracies are more resilient. I believe these authoritarian regimes are actually quite brittle. And so I think we’re going to win this competition. I begin seeing our society mobilized because we recognize the problems associated with defense. This is a big shift. I think after the massive reinvasion of Ukraine, before that we tended to see a soft-headed cosmopolitanism take over people’s view of the world. They thought we were all just going to get along as an international community. And so when I see companies like SHIELD mobilizing capital to strengthen our nation from a defense perspective, but also an economic perspective, and to maintain our competitive advantages, I think there is no substitute for the advantages of our free-market economy and our unbridled entrepreneurship. So I’m optimistic, but I think we have to get serious and stay serious about investing in defense, making our supply chains more resilient, invigorating our defense industrial base in particular, and regaining some of the strategic depth that is necessary to convince your enemy. As you alluded to at the beginning, Phil, this is a lot about deterrence. It’s a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one, but we have to convince our adversaries that we’re capable of defending ourselves, that we’re capable of conducting operations at sufficient scale and for ample duration to deny them the ability to accomplish their objectives through the use of force. And this entails military capabilities, hard power, but it also entails competing below the threshold of a major conflict in the cognitive domain and in the economic domain. But I think we’re up to it. We’re up to it.
Philip 56:43
That’s very encouraging. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much. This is the beginning of a dialogue for all of our friends at SHIELD and our investors. We have these types of discussions. There were some questions I was not able to get to. We will answer them and send you written responses in coordination with General McMaster. H.R., thank you so much. You’re a star, so we appreciate it.
