Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. 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 in a social media post.

The USS Ford is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea along with three destroyers. It would likely take several days for the ships to make the journey to South America.

Deploying an aircraft carrier is a major escalation of military power in a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela.

  • TommySoda@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Can’t wait to hear how conservatives that voted on the basis of “no more new wars” will justify this. Probably some dumb excuse about how going after cartels doesn’t count as a war and that makes it okay.

    • pachrist@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      It’s only a war if Congress votes on it.

      This will be everyone’s uncle at Thanksgiving, finally having an outlet for all the WWII documentaries.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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        14 days ago

        Guess I’m the uncle, but that’s why they stopped calling everything wars, and what we got is exactly what Eisenhower warned about. The last “good” Republican. Some older left wing voters called themselves the Eisenhower Democrats. History doesn’t have clean lines, but that period was definitely one of the markers of US political shift.