Pentagon Sending Aircraft Carrier to South America

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said Friday the military is deploying an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, a move the Washington Post describes as a "major escalation" of the US military presence in the region. Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to the US Southern Command region to "bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States," Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media.

The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea, per the AP. It was not immediately clear how long it would take the ships to make the journey. Meanwhile, the US military has conducted its 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, Hegseth said earlier Friday, blaming the Tren de Aragua gang for operating the vessel and leaving six people dead in the Caribbean Sea.

The attacks and an unusually large US military buildup in the Caribbean and the waters off Venezuela have raised speculation that the administration could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who faces US charges of narcoterrorism. In the latest move, the US military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela on Thursday. The Trump administration maintains that it's combating drug trafficking into the United States.