The President's Daily Brief
November 13th, 2025: Inside Venezuela’s Plan To Resist A U.S. Invasion & Ukraine’s Air Defenses Falter
13 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It's Thursday, the 13th of November. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, as the American military buildup in the Caribbean continues, a new report sheds light on just how Venezuela plans to fight back if the U.S.
makes a move on the Maduro regime, turning to guerrilla tactics and chaos to grind U.S. forces to a halt. At least, that's the plan, apparently. I'll have those details. Later in the show, troubling news for Ukraine. New data shows that its air defenses are slipping as Russia's missile and drone barrages intensify.
Plus, Colombia has become the latest nation to suspend cooperation with the U.S., cutting off intelligence sharing over Washington's recent strikes on drug traffickers. And in today's back of the brief, Yemen's Houthi rebels, remember them? Well, they say they've halted all attacks on Israel and the Red Sea shipping, signaling a pause in their campaign as the Gaza ceasefire holds.
But first, today's PDB Spotlight. America's most powerful aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, along with its strike group, arrived in the Caribbean this week. And just hours after the carrier group appeared on the radar, Venezuela's defense minister, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, announced what he called a, quote, massive national mobilization.
He declared that the country's entire military arsenal was now on, quote, full operational readiness. Ooh, how about that? According to Caracas, the order includes the deployment of ground, air, naval, riverine, and missile forces, with every branch of the armed forces, militias, and security units participating. Maduro's government claims that some 200,000 personnel are involved.
Now, it's worth noting that numbers like that are hard to verify. But one thing is certain, the Maduro regime wants the world, and particularly Washington, to believe, anyway, that it's ready for a fight. Now, obviously, Venezuela's conventional military is no match for the U.S., and for that I give myself the PDB statement of the obvious award for the day.
But that's where a new Reuters-exclusive report sheds some light on how Caracas actually plans to respond if things do get messy. If you're a regular listener, you'll know that we focus largely on the massive amount of U.S. hardware that's been pouring into the region, the ships, the aircraft, and precision munitions.
But one thing we haven't given much attention to is just how Venezuela would potentially mount its resistance in the event of a conflict with the U.S. Well, today's Reuters report gives us some insight, and what they're planning says a lot about the shortcomings of the Venezuelan military.
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Chapter 2: How is Venezuela preparing to resist a potential U.S. invasion?
would face not only a hostile regime, but a collapsing state. Well, one could argue that it's already collapsing. It's not exactly a strategy born of strength. It's an acknowledgement that Venezuela's army, despite its size on paper, is poorly trained and poorly equipped and deeply demoralized.
Most of its arsenal consists of aging Soviet-era Russian hardware, T-72 tanks, Sukhoi fighter jets, and surface-to-air systems that are decades old. Troops are underpaid, earning roughly $100 a month in local currency, and have little combat experience beyond domestic policing, crowd control, and beating political dissidents who oppose Maduro.
That leaves the regime with one realistic option, to make an invasion too costly, too messy, and too politically painful for the U.S. to sustain. To pull that off, the Maduro government is relying heavily on its civilian militias. It's a network of loyalists trained to conduct urban warfare and sabotage.
They've been preparing since at least 2019, when fears of a U.S.-backed uprising were at their peak. The documents reviewed by Reuters describe a, quote, all of nation approach where militias, intelligence services and pro regime gangs known as collectivos would all be mobilized. These groups would attack infrastructure, block roads and stage hit and run strikes on supply convoys.
And there's another layer to this strategy, and that would be propaganda. The mobilization isn't just about military readiness, it's about messaging. Maduro wants to frame any confrontation with the U.S. as imperial aggression, hoping to rally nationalist sentiment at home and sympathetic governments abroad. The move also plays well with his allies.
Cuba, Iran, and Russia have all provided support, technical, financial, and rhetorical, to the Maduro regime, and if fighting were to break out, each could provide asymmetric assistance, cyber operations, weapons transfers, or intelligence sharing. So, you ask yourself, what does all this mean for Washington?
Well, it means that any military confrontation, however limited, wouldn't be likely quick or clean. Even if U.S. forces could destroy Venezuela's command structure in days, the aftermath could devolve into a grinding insurgency, with militias and criminal networks and foreign intelligence services all in the mix. The question, then, isn't whether the U.S. could win.
It's whether it could contain the chaos that follows. For Maduro, this playbook is as much about deterrence as defense. By making the cost of invasion appear to be unbearable, he's trying to prevent it altogether. It's a strategy that depends on convincing President Trump that Venezuela is better left alone.
All right, coming up after the break, Ukraine's air defenses are slipping, showing cracks as Russia steps up its attacks. And Colombia suspends intelligence ties with the U.S. over American strikes on drug traffickers in the Caribbean. I'll be right back. Hey, Mike Baker here.
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