US military buildup decreases in region as USS Gerald R Ford leaves

Last week, af­ter close to three months in the Caribbean, the nu­clear-pow­ered air­craft car­ri­er USS Ger­ald R Ford left the re­gion.

The Ger­ald R Ford, the largest war­ship ever built, has been in the Caribbean since No­vem­ber 16 as part of a buildup of mil­i­tary might to fight nar­co traf­fick­ing in the re­gion.

As part of the mil­i­tary ar­se­nal of the US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion- called Op­er­a­tion South­ern Spear- the Ger­ald R Ford was in­te­gral in the cap­ture of Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicholas Maduro and his wife on Jan­u­ary 3 by the US mil­i­tary.

In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary, the Ford was re­port­ed­ly in the vicin­i­ty of St Thomas, one of the US Vir­gin Is­lands.

Last week, the BBC re­port­ed that the Ford was head­ing through the Strait of Gibral­tar. It comes amid height­ened ten­sions with Iran.

Short­ly af­ter Maduro’s cap­ture, US mil­i­tary air­craft based in Puer­to Ri­co had be­gun leav­ing the re­gion.

On Fri­day, the BBC said that in the past 24 hours, it tracked over 50 trans­port, re­con­nais­sance and re­fu­elling jets.

The buildup was sim­i­lar to what oc­curred in the Caribbean pri­or to Maduro’s cap­ture. While the mil­i­tary pres­ence in the re­gion has grad­u­al­ly de­creased, bomb­ings in the Pa­cif­ic have con­tin­ued.

US Pres­i­dent Trump had said that in the com­ing days, it would be de­ter­mined whether the US will reach a deal with Iran or take mil­i­tary ac­tion.

Even with the US now fo­cus­ing on the Mid­dle East, last week, De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge said the mil­i­tary radar sys­tem in To­ba­go will re­main for some time be­cause it is need­ed along with US troops on the ground to as­sist in the fight against crime.

The in­stal­la­tion of the radar was con­firmed by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar in No­vem­ber 2025 amid the US mil­i­tary buildup. At that time, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said it was not in­tend­ed to launch any at­tack against Venezuela, but to en­hance sur­veil­lance against nar­cotics traf­fick­ers.

Sturge said that T&T needs the radar, de­scribed as a mul­ti-mis­sion air and mis­sile sur­veil­lance sys­tem.

“We would have the use of the radar for the fore­see­able fu­ture. I can’t give a de­fin­i­tive time­line and the rea­son why we need it, we al­ready have a radar cen­tre but our radar sys­tems are some­what lim­it­ed.

“The radar sys­tems pro­vid­ed by the US, they work with drone tech­nol­o­gy, satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions and so on, so that it of­fers a lot more than what we have and that is need­ed at this point in time to achieve cer­tain ob­jec­tives,” he had said.

He chose not to dis­close the quan­tum of for­eign mil­i­tary per­son­nel in T&T, say­ing it was not in the pub­lic in­ter­est.