The Venezuelan Flotilla Scenario
*Note: This story is fiction; I made it up while watching the news.
In mid-January 2026 the South American country of Venezuela implemented a novel approach to counter the extrajudicial destruction of boats by the United States armed forces.
Several widely available videos from the United States showed small Venezuelan boats getting blown up by missiles and killing all those aboard. Many Americans found these actions to be very disturbing, murder in the name of narco-terrorism, equivalent to war crimes, immoral, and just plain wrong.
The United States under President Trump targeted the boats based on the assumption they ferried illicit drugs to the United States. However, no conclusive evidence verified this assertion.
Under normal circumstances, boats suspected of carrying contraband get intercepted and searched by authorities all part of an investigation following due process procedures. Interdiction such as this can produce crucial information usable in the effort to dismantle the production and distribution of illegal drugs. Blowing up small boats in the Caribbean Sea does not generate new information about illegal drug networks.
The second Trump administration identifies “drug cartels and other transnational criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations,” and therefore subject to military intervention.
The Venezuelan government gathered two dozen radio-controlled fishing boats of various sizes and loaded them with bales of old newspapers, cardboard, and other trash, all wrapped up in white sheets so they looked like the bundles of alleged drugs on the previously destroyed boats.
Workers loaded a several fully dressed mannequins onto the boats and posed them to look like they steered the boats. A couple of the mannequins had motorized arms so the mannequins appeared to wave.
The boats got launched in three groups of eight, all on a similar heading, but hundreds of meters apart. The first missiles aimed at the first wave of boats only sunk three of them and before the next missiles got fired, there were 13 boats slowly moving in international waters. By the time the next targeted missiles wiped out three more boats, 18 radio controlled Venezuelan boats bobbled up and town on the water.
Several United States naval officers noticed the remaining boats no longer appeared be moving on their initial headings and seemed to simply float on the surface of the ocean. Officials determined that there were too many boats for the missiles to target and dispatched several combat rubber raiding crafts equipped with powerful outboard motors, each carrying several armed personnel.
As they drew closer to the Venezuelan flotilla, it did not take the soldiers long to discover that there were no drugs or people on any of the small boats. They also learned that the boats were controlled remotely from the Venezuelan mainland.
A journalist from one of the major news outlets filmed the admiral’s reaction when he heard the entire mission was essentially a practical joke played on the American military and caused the United States to spend a great deal of resources only to find that the whole thing was a complete waste of time and money.
“We got bamboozled. Damn, what an embarrassment,” Was all he said.
Headlines in Venezuelan news outlets read: ¡Te hemos engañado, señor presidente! ¡La broma te ha salido cara! (We fooled you Mr. President! The joke is on you!) These words were accompanied by video recordings showing how the Venezuelans prepared the boats for launch, including the bundled trash, the mannequins, and the remote-control equipment.
Given the political climate in late 2025, the reaction in Washington to the “Venezuelan Flotilla Debacle” was typically absurd. Not surprisingly, the President said the entire episode was part of an extensive conspiracy cooked by up democrats in order to make the President look bad and turn the United States into an international laughing stock.
It was not a conspiracy cooked up by Democrats. However, Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, along with a sizeable number of Republicans, demanded that the United States return to interdiction as the most effective way to combat international drug trafficking on the open seas. At this point, we’re still waiting for a response.
