Venezuela Strike Marks A Turning Point For Us Cyber Warfare

President Donald Trump and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine suggested that the U.S. used its cyber might to plunge Caracas into darkness during the capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday — a stunning disclosure from the leaders of a nation that has long maintained a veil of secrecy around its sophisticated cyber operations.

Trump’s comments, made hours after the large-scale military operation, mark one of the first times a U.S. president has so publicly alluded to U.S. cyber efforts against other nations, as these operations are typically highly classified. It also serves as a stern warning for top cyber foes, including Russia and China, that the U.S. has the cyber capabilities to inflict serious damage — and is not shy about using them.

“Policymakers are getting more comfortable employing and, crucially, acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” said Michael Sulmeyer, former assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy under the Biden administration. “It is one thing to do it; it is another to say it.”

The Jan. 3 strikes on Venezuela’s capital and subsequent seizure of Maduro and his wife involved close coordination among federal agencies and military units, and took months of careful planning. In a press conference following the strikes, Caine said U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for U.S. forces flying into the country before dawn Saturday.

Trump, at the same press conference, was more overt in his description of U.S. cyber involvement: “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” he said. “It was dark, and it was deadly.”

Beyond these small-but-significant nods toward U.S. cyber power, details about how exactly the U.S. was able to pull off such a feat were slim. A spokesperson for the Pentagon declined to comment on the specifics of U.S. cyber operations in Venezuela, while spokespersons for the White House and Cyber Command did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, clues on how the mission was conducted have emerged. Internet tracking group NetBlocks reported a loss of internet connectivity in Caracas that occurred around the same time as power cuts in the country. Venezuela’s electric energy ministry said Monday that power cuts in some areas of the country were due to U.S. attacks.

Chinese-made radar systems and Russian-made air defense systems were also reportedly disrupted during the strikes, hampering the Venezuelan government’s ability to effectively respond.

In a statement, a Space Force spokesperson declined to comment on details of its operations, but noted that “space-based capabilities such as Positioning, Navigation and Timing and satellite communications are foundational to all modern military activities,” and that “U.S. Space Command possesses the means and willingness to employ combat-credible capabilities that deter and counter our opponents.”

These efforts point to a more aggressive use of U.S. military technology and cyber expertise in foreign operations — a shift that the administration has repeatedly touted since Trump’s first term. In 2018, a classified national security policy memorandum was signed, expanding the Pentagon’s authorities to conduct offensive cyber strikes. This policy was later refined under the Biden administration.

Joshua Steinman, who served as senior director for cyber on the National Security Council under the first Trump administration, said that the Venezuela strikes demonstrate that the U.S. “is finally in a place where we can use cyber as a tool of national power.”

“We worked for four years in the first administration to get [the U.S. government] in a place where cyber could be used at the speed of relevance, and it looks like President Trump finally did it,” Steinman said.

This strategic show of strength comes at a time when top U.S. cyber adversaries, including China and Russia, have significantly enhanced their attacks on U.S. networks. Russian hackers were linked to breaches of the Democratic National Committee systems in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, Chinese state-sponsored hackers have been found burrowed inside U.S. critical infrastructure and have infiltrated telecommunication networks to spy on themobile devices of top U.S. officials, including those of Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Eric O’Neill, a former FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence operative, said the recent use of cyberattacks may help “raise some caution and concern in the Chinese and Russians that we’re able to do this as well.”

“It’s an incredibly stark warning,” he said. “You strike us, we can strike you.”

Others are urging the administration to exercise greater discretion, so as not to reveal too much about the nation’s cyber prowess and possibly weaken our hand.

Only a few past U.S. cyber operations against other countries have come to light in recent years. In 2020, Trump confirmed that the U.S. disrupted a prolific troll farm in Moscow during the 2018 midterms, as part of Washington’s efforts to crack down on Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Perhaps most well-known, the U.S. installed malware called Stuxnet on computers in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, causing centrifuges to fail and significantly set back Tehran’s nuclear program.

“Once it became more overt and more public, that capability was no longer in the toolkit,” Lindsay Gorman, managing director of the German Marshall Foundation’s Technology Program, said of the Stuxnet malware operation.

Gorman warned that in using cyberattacks against Venezuela, “we could be tipping our hand a bit.”

“There’s a reason we keep things closer to the vest, and that’s because our adversaries are watching how we do things; they have intelligence operations dedicated to figuring out what U.S. cyber doctrine and capabilities are,” he added.

Senate Homeland Security Committee ranking member Gary Peters (D-Mich.), whose committee has jurisdiction over some cybersecurity issues, said Tuesday that he would “opt to try to keep [cyber operations] more secret,” noting that top officials publicly discussing U.S. capabilities “is unusual.”

Still, the operation in Venezuela has raised the profile of U.S. cyber efforts, putting it at the forefront of military planning at a time when adversaries are adapting quickly on the battlefield.

“It’s become clearer that cyber conflict is a part of kinetic operations,” Anne Neuberger, former deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology under the Biden administration, said. “We should expect to see these kinds of operations as a regular part of more military planning and operations in the future.”