Putin and EU, Watch and Learn: How to Take Venezuela in Two Hours

The raid on Caracas that landed Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Centre has surely focused minds in the Kremlin.  For twenty-five years, Vladimir Putin lavished funds on his armed forces and elite airborne units.  Yet when called to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership and neutralise Kyiv’s military, they failed miserably.  The cream of Russia’s professional army were slaughtered on the approaches to Bucha and across the runways of Hostomel.  A planned three day blitzkrieg devolved into grinding four year bloodbath.  

The Russian military simply does not have the capacity and skills to launch an operation like Absolute Resolve.  The US shut down the entire military communication and air defence systems of a country twice the size of Germany, penetrated a heavily guarded compound and spirited the Venezuelan leader away without the loss of a single American life.  Equipment expensively sourced from Moscow didn’t save Maduro, nor did his cadre of Cuban guards trained to Russian Spetsnaz standards.  Putin stakes his credibility on his capacity to protect his allies, yet has been unable to do so in Damascus, Teheran and now Caracas.  He will no doubt require his military commanders study the US operation and develop similar capabilities, assuming enough of his army survives the Ukrainian cauldron.

Less has been made of how far Europe is from developing these capacities.  Polish PM Donald Tusk announced that Europe is “finished” if it doesn’t unite, yet unity requires far more than coordinating the foreign policies of 27 states.  Eliminating national vetoes in the Council won’t magic up a unified European military force.  If the EU is ever to exercise strategic autonomy, it will have to integrate the military capacities scattered across its member states.  This is much easier said than done, despite bureaucratic oddities like the Eurocorps, which remains outside the formal governance structures of the EU thirty years after its creation.  Long before Delta Force rappelled onto the roof of the Miraflores presidential palace, the US military devoted itself to  mastering complex joint operations involving the Army, Air Force, Navy and the intelligence community.  The Goldwater-Nichols reforms in 1986 constrained the individual service fiefdoms that hindered operations from Vietnam to Grenada.  A generation of US military leaders learned “jointness” and the effectiveness of cooperation across the full range of American military capacities.  The seamless coordination of the vast array of military assets deployed in Absolute Resolve is a hard-won tribute to decades of ambitious reform.