(MENAFN- The Conversation) The arrival of the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in the Caribbean basin on November 11 has intensified fears of a large-scale conflict in the region. The carrier has been deployed as part of US president Donald Trump's campaign against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific allegedly transporting drugs bound for the US.

But some experts suspect that the real objective is to support a possible US military strike aimed at toppling the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Trump has long accused the Venezuelan government of being a criminal organisation, offering US$50 million (£38 million) earlier in 2025 for information leading to Maduro's arrest.

Trump recently authorised the CIA to conduct covert lethal operations inside Venezuela, adding that his administration was now considering operations on land. The deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which has 4,000 sailors and dozens of aircraft on board, further raises the stakes.

However, US military action in Venezuela would carry immense risks. The Venezuelan government has long been preparing for an asymmetric conflict with the US, eccentric as this may have sounded in the past.

The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier near the Norwegian capital, Oslo, in September 2025. Lise Aserud / EPA Venezuela's military doctrine

In 2002, the Venezuelan government was subject to a US-backed coup attempt. This prompted Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leader at the time, to promote an overhaul of national military thinking to deal with a possible US invasion.

His strategy incorporated principles of “people's war”, a Maoist tactic used extensively by Vietnamese military commander Vo Nguyen Giap in the Vietnam war. This tactic accepts ceding territory to an invading force initially, in favour of engaging the enemy in guerilla-style warfare until the conflict becomes impossible to sustain.

A key part of the tactic is that it blurs the boundaries between society and the battlefield, relying on the support and participation of the population. Reflecting on so-called people's wars in the first half of the 19th century, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed that the strongest wars are those driven by the determination of the people.

The concept of people's war and asymmetric warfare has been codified in anti-imperialist doctrines throughout the 20th century. This is especially true for the Vietnamese guerrilla leaders. But it was also adopted more loosely by insurgencies such as the Taliban, which fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Iraqi resistance against US forces in the early 2000s featured highly in Chávez's mind. Venezuela's then-president had thousands of copies of Spanish political scientist Jorge Verstrynge's 2005 book, Peripheral Warfare and Revolutionary Islam, distributed within the Venezuelan army. The book draws on the experience of jihadist groups to emphasise the power of smaller, irregular formations in deciding asymmetric conflicts.

The Bolivarian Militia, a special branch of the Venezuelan armed forces created in 2008, embodies the doctrine of people's war by incorporating civilians into national security mobilisation. Membership of the militia grew from 1.6 million in 2018 to 5 million by 2024, according to official figures. Under Maduro, the Venezuelan government has said it wants to expand membership to 8.5 million people.

The goal of the militia is not to duplicate conventional Venezuelan armed forces, but to extend their presence across the country. Venezuela's territorial defence system is based on military deployments at regional, state and municipal levels, with personnel and missions assigned according to local geography and population.

Under Chávez, this system was broken down into much smaller units, covering specific municipal areas and communities. This level of capillarity is possible because it relies on civilian soldiers from the Bolivarian Militia and their profound knowledge of local areas.

For a large proportion of militia men and women, especially older members, their main task would not involve weapons. They would probably be tasked with carrying out what the government calls“popular intelligence” – in other words, surveillance.

This has already been reinforced with a recently launched mobile phone app which allows Venezuelans to report“everything they see and hear” in their neighbourhood that they consider suspicious.

The Bolivarian Militia had 5 million official members in 2024. Miguel Gutierrez / EPA Political and economic quagmire

A powerful US invading force would probably be allowed to march into Venezuela relatively easily. The problem would be the ensuing political and military quagmire that Venezuela's military doctrine has been designed to create.

There are many uncertainties surrounding this scenario. On the Venezuelan side, civil-military coordination in wartime would be highly complex. Large-scale exercises have seen hundreds of thousands of regular troops, militia members and police simulating possible wartime scenarios. But their logistics have never been tested in real life.

Another uncertainty concerns the cohesion of combatants. Trump's hardline posture towards Venezuela could trigger a“rally round the flag” effect, reinforcing loyalty to the government in the early stages of war. But the ideological commitment of militia members in a protracted scenario is another question.

On the US side, Trump's plan for Venezuela remains unclear. Assuming Washington's aim is to install an opposition government, it's not obvious how such an administration could survive in the days and weeks after taking power. A conflict could also trigger another wave of Venezuelan emigration, adding to the 8 million-strong diaspora living mostly in Latin American countries.

The Bolivarian doctrine hopes that the prospect of“another Iraq” in Latin America serves as a deterrent against US intervention in Venezuela. But it is unclear whether Trump is taking this prospect seriously.

The US president reportedly considers Venezuela“unfinished business” from his first term in office. At that time, he imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector, saying in 2023:“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would've taken it over, and would've gotten all that oil.”

Yet a military solution now would still risk leaving this business unfinished for the foreseeable future.

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