President Donald Trump has strongly hinted that the United States used offensive cyber capabilities to help plunge Caracas into darkness during the operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro an unusually public nod to U.S. cyber power.
The blackout, which coincided with pre-dawn military strikes on January 3, appears to have been part of a broader effort to disable Venezuela’s defenses and disorient loyalist forces as U.S. units moved in.
Public Hints of a Covert Cyber Strike
Speaking at a press conference alongside Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine, Trump said “the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” calling the operation “dark, and deadly.”
Caine described how U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command, and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to create a pathway for aircraft entering Venezuelan airspace before dawn, implying a tightly coordinated blend of cyber and kinetic operations.
Officials have not released technical details, but outside indicators point to a digital component.
Internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported major connectivity losses in Caracas around the same time as reported power cuts, while Venezuela’s electric energy ministry publicly blamed U.S. attacks for outages in several regions.
Chinese-made radar and Russian-built air defense systems were also reportedly disrupted during the strikes, degrading the regime’s ability to track or respond to incoming forces.
Experts say the unusually direct comments signal a shift toward more overt acknowledgment of cyber as a tool of national power.
Former Pentagon cyber official Michael Sulmeyer noted that policymakers are becoming more comfortable not just using, but openly “acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” framing the Caracas blackout as a warning to adversaries like Russia and China.
Joshua Steinman, who oversaw cyber issues on Trump’s National Security Council in his first term, argued the Venezuela strike shows the U.S. can now “use cyber as a tool of national power” at the “speed of relevance.”
Former FBI operative Eric O’Neill called the operation an “incredibly stark warning” meant to signal that if adversaries strike U.S. networks, “we can strike you” in return.
Not everyone is comfortable with the new openness. Analysts like Lindsay Gorman warn that making cyber operations more public can “tip our hand,” echoing concerns that once capabilities like the Stuxnet malware against Iran became widely known, they effectively dropped out of the U.S. toolkit.
Senate Homeland Security ranking member Gary Peters said he would “opt to try to keep cyber operations more secret,” calling such public remarks “unusual” for top officials.
According to the POLITICO, Former White House cyber adviser Anne Neuberger said the Venezuela operation underscores how “cyber conflict is a part of kinetic operations” and predicted such integrated campaigns will become a regular feature of future military planning, even as debates continue over how much to say about them in public.
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