In a significant military development, the Pentagon revealed Friday that the U.S. is dispatching an aircraft carrier to South American waters. This move is part of an intensified military response in a region where the Trump administration has recently increased its strikes against vessels suspected of drug trafficking.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced via social media that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying strike group to head to the U.S. Southern Command area. The aim is to enhance the U.S.’s ability to detect, monitor, and counter activities that threaten national safety and prosperity, Parnell explained.

Currently, the USS Ford, accompanied by five destroyers, is stationed in the Mediterranean Sea. One destroyer is operating in the Arabian Sea and another in the Red Sea, according to an insider familiar with the mission. As of Friday, the aircraft carrier was docked in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.

The source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of military operations, did not disclose the timeline for the strike group’s arrival in South American waters or confirm if all five destroyers would accompany the carrier.

This deployment signifies a major increase in U.S. military presence in a region that has already witnessed a substantial buildup in the Caribbean Sea and near Venezuela. The accelerated pace of U.S. military actions, including a strike on Friday, has spurred speculation about the Trump administration’s objectives, especially concerning Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who faces U.S. narcoterrorism charges.

Moving thousands more troops into the region

Currently, over 6,000 sailors and Marines are stationed on eight warships in the region. If the USS Ford’s strike group joins them, it could add nearly 4,500 personnel and nine aircraft squadrons to the existing force.

Complicating the situation is Tropical Storm Melissa, which has been nearly stationary in the central Caribbean with forecasters warning it could soon strengthen into a powerful hurricane.

Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had conducted the 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, leaving six people dead and bringing the death count for the attacks that began in early September to at least 43 people.

Hegseth said on social media that the vessel struck overnight was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. It was the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.

The strikes have ramped up from one every few weeks when they first began last month to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.

“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in his post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”

US focus on Venezuela and Tren de Aragua

The strike drew parallels to the first announced by the U.S. last month by focusing on Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization and blamed for being at the root of the violence and drug dealing that plague some cities.

While not mentioning the origin of the latest boat, the Republican administration says at least four of the boats it has hit have come from Venezuela. On Thursday, the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela.

Maduro argues that the U.S. operations are the latest effort to force him out of office.

Maduro on Thursday praised security forces and a civilian militia for defense exercises along some 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles) of coastline to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. attack.

In the span of six hours, “100% of all the country’s coastline was covered in real time, with all the equipment and heavy weapons to defend all of Venezuela’s coasts if necessary,” Maduro said during a government event shown on state television.

The U.S. military’s presence is less about drugs than sending a message to countries in the region to align with U.S. interests, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region.

“An expression that I’m hearing a lot is ‘Drugs are the excuse.’ And everyone knows that,” Dickinson said. “And I think that message is very clear in regional capitals. So the messaging here is that the U.S. is intent on pursuing specific objectives. And it will use military force against leaders and countries that don’t fall in line.”

Comparing the drug crackdown to the war on terror

Hegseth’s remarks around the strikes have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.

President Donald Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.

When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request that Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House.

Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who previously worked in the Pentagon and the State Department, including as an adviser in Afghanistan.

“We have no idea how far this is going, how this could potentially bring in, you know, is it going to be boots on the ground? Is it going to be escalatory in a way where we could see us get bogged down for a long time?” he said.

Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, who has long been involved in foreign affairs in the hemisphere, said of Trump’s approach: “It’s about time.”

While Trump “obviously hates war,” he also is not afraid to use the U.S. military in targeted operations, Diaz-Balart said. “I would not want to be in the shoes of any of these narco-cartels.”

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Associated Press writers Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Ben Finley and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to show there have been a total of at least 43 deaths from the strikes, not 46.