Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a roundtable discussion on criminal cartels with President Trump in the State Dining Room of the White House on Thursday.

Evan Vucci/AP

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Evan Vucci/AP

WASHINGTON – The US military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, the Pentagon announced Friday, in the latest escalation of military firepower in a region where the Trump administration has unleashed more rapid attacks in recent days against ships it accuses of transporting drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to the US Southern Command region to “strengthen the United States’ ability to detect, monitor and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the security and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media.

The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is now deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. One of its destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another in the Red Sea, a person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press. The aircraft carrier was in a Croatian port in the Adriatic Sea until Friday.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, did not say how long it would take the strike group to reach South American waters or whether the five destroyers would make the trip.

The deployment of an aircraft carrier will bring significant additional resources to a region that has already seen an unusually large US military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela.

The latest deployment and the accelerated pace of U.S. strikes, including one on Friday, have raised new speculation about how far the Trump administration may go in operations it says target drug trafficking, including whether it could try to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He faces narcoterrorism charges in the US.

Move thousands more troops to the region

There are already more than 6,000 sailors and marines aboard eight warships in the region. When the entire USS Ford strike group arrives, it could bring nearly 4,500 more sailors, as well as the nine aircraft squadrons assigned to the carrier.

Complicating the situation is Tropical Storm Melissa, which has been nearly stationary in the central Caribbean and forecasters warn it could soon become a powerful hurricane.

Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had carried out its 10th attack on a suspected drug smuggling ship, leaving six people dead and raising the death toll from attacks that began in early September to at least 43 people.

Hegseth said on social media that the boat that crashed overnight was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. It was the second time the Trump administration linked one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.

“If you are a narcoterrorist smuggling drugs into our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in his post. “Day or night, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”

The attacks have increased from one every few weeks when they began last month to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people. Two of the most recent attacks were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers, including Colombia, is smuggled.

Amid rising tensions with Colombia, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Friday on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family and a member of his government over allegations of involvement in global drug trafficking.

The US focuses on Venezuela and the Aragua Train

Friday’s attack drew parallels to the first announced by the United States last month by focusing on the Aragua Train, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization and blames for being at the root of the violence and drug trafficking plaguing some cities.

While it does not mention the origin of the latest ship, the Republican administration says that at least four of the attacked ships come from Venezuela. On Thursday, the US military brought a pair of supersonic heavy bombers to the coast of Venezuela.

Maduro maintains that the US operations are the last effort to force him from office.

Maduro on Thursday praised security forces and a civilian militia for defense exercises along about 1,200 miles of coastline to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. attack.

In the span of six hours, “100% of the country’s entire coastline was covered in real time, with all the equipment and heavy weapons to defend all of Venezuela’s coasts if necessary,” Maduro said during a government event broadcast on state television.

The U.S. military presence has less to do with drugs than with sending a message to countries in the region to align with U.S. interests, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region.

“An expression I hear a lot is ‘Drugs are the excuse.’ And everyone knows it,” Dickinson said. “And I think that message is very clear in regional capitals. So the message here is that the United States intends to pursue specific objectives. And it will use military force against leaders and countries that do not align.”

Comparing the fight against drugs with the war on terrorism

Hegseth’s comments on the attacks have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the United States declared after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.

This month, President Trump declared drug cartels illegal combatants and said the United States was in “armed conflict” with them, drawing on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.

When Trump was asked by reporters on Thursday if he would request that Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that was not the plan.

“I think we’re just going to kill the people who are bringing drugs into our country, okay? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be as good as dead,” Trump said during a White House roundtable.

Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concern that Trump would order military action without receiving congressional authorization or providing many details.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who previously worked at the Pentagon and the State Department, including as an adviser in Afghanistan.

“We have no idea how far this is going, how this could go, you know, will there be troops on the ground? Will it escalate in such a way that we could be stuck for a long time?” said.

Republican Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida, who has long been involved in foreign affairs in the hemisphere, said of Trump’s approach: “It’s about time.”

While Trump “obviously hates it,” he also isn’t afraid to use the U.S. military in specific operations, Diaz-Balart said. “I wouldn’t want to be in the place of any of these drug cartels.”