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U.S. Forces Refine Ship-to-Shore Tactics with Close Air Support in Puerto Rico amid Venezuela Tensions.
U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units carried out intensive amphibious and airborne training at Arroyo, Puerto Rico, with Reuters capturing rare close imagery of landing craft, armored vehicles, and low-flying helicopters. The drills arrive as Washington strengthens its Caribbean posture under Operation Southern Spear, a move that signals flexible military options if Venezuela's crisis worsens.
On December 5, 2025, U.S. Navy and Marine Corps forces were photographed conducting intense landing and airborne training on the beach at Arroyo, Puerto Rico, as Reuters reported, with photos taken by Ricardo Arduengo. The sequence of landing craft approaching the shore, amphibious vehicles rolling through the surf and attack helicopters flying low over the coastline comes after months of large-scale exercises along Puerto Rico’s southern coast. These activities unfold while the United States is reinforcing its military presence in the Caribbean under Operation Southern Spear, a campaign officially focused on countering narcotics networks but closely watched in the context of the crisis in Venezuela. The Arroyo training offers a rare, detailed look at how amphibious and air assets are being combined in Puerto Rico to preserve a spectrum of options in any future Venezuelan contingency.
U.S. Navy and Marine forces carried out coordinated amphibious and air drills on a Puerto Rico beach, showcasing a mix of landing craft, armored vehicles, and low-flying helicopters as part of a wider Caribbean buildup linked to the Venezuela crisis (Picture Source: Ricardo Arduengo)
The images from Arroyo show a complete ship-to-shore logistics sequence compressed into a narrow stretch of coastline. A U.S. Navy landing craft utility, LCU-1662, shuttles between the amphibious group offshore and the beach, lowering its bow ramp to deliver Humvees, a bulldozer carrying ammunition crates and Light Amphibious Resupply Cargo (LARC) vehicles directly onto the sand, while service members guide traffic and secure the perimeter. In the background and overhead, U.S. Marine Corps Bell AH-1Z Vipers cross the shoreline, providing armed overwatch as equipment is offloaded and repositioned inland. These scenes illustrate a coordinated landing and airborne profile in which naval, ground and aviation elements rehearse the rapid establishment of a temporary beachhead.
Beyond their visual impact, the platforms visible in Arroyo correspond to a classic Marine Expeditionary Unit toolset adapted to littoral operations. The amphibious transport dock USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD-28), a San Antonio-class ship, is designed to embark a reinforced Marine battalion, its vehicles and supplies, and to project them ashore via a combination of landing craft and helicopters, acting as a mobile sea base and command node for operations in the region. LCU-type landing craft, such as LCU-1662, provide the heavy logistics bridge between ship and shore, capable of transporting wheeled and tracked vehicles, bulk ammunition and engineering equipment directly onto austere or unsecured beaches without relying on port infrastructure.
LARC vehicles, smaller but highly versatile, are optimized for short-range resupply between the surf zone and inland dispersal areas, useful where terrain or damage to infrastructure limits conventional trucks. Overhead, the AH-1Z Viper, a twin-engine attack helicopter optimized for shipboard deployment, combines advanced sensors with precision-guided munitions to provide close air support, armed escort for landing craft and real-time reconnaissance for commanders on the beach. Together, these defense products form an integrated package that can insert, protect and sustain a landing force along a contested or politically sensitive coastline.
From a training perspective, the repeated cycles of loading and offloading equipment in Arroyo appear designed to refine the entire ship-to-shore chain rather than to stage a one-off demonstration. LCU-1662’s movements, the sequencing of LARC vehicles through the surf and the employment of engineering assets such as bulldozers point to rehearsals of how to create and then dismantle small, temporary logistics nodes on an unsecured shore. This pattern reflects doctrinal trends within the U.S. Marine Corps toward expeditionary advanced base operations and distributed maritime operations, which emphasize smaller, mobile forces operating from dispersed coastal positions instead of a single large beachhead.
In the Caribbean context, training in Puerto Rico offers an environment with real surf conditions, limited beach infrastructure and proximity to airfields and ports, enabling realistic integration of amphibious landings, airborne overwatch and rapid re-embarkation. Arroyo thus functions as both a laboratory for refining tactics and a visible signal of the readiness of U.S. amphibious forces assigned to U.S. Southern Command.
These tactical drills take place against a broader strategic backdrop marked by heightened U.S.–Venezuela tensions and an unprecedented naval buildup in the southern Caribbean. Since late summer 2025, the United States has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group, multiple destroyers and cruisers, and several amphibious ready groups to the region under Operation Southern Spear, bringing the number of U.S. personnel in the wider area to well over 10,000 and, according to some estimates, closer to 14,000–15,000 as additional units arrived in November. The stated objective of this campaign is to disrupt maritime drug-trafficking networks linked to Latin American cartels and elements within the Venezuelan security apparatus.
In parallel, Venezuela has mobilized forces along its coastline and denounced the U.S. presence as a threat to its sovereignty, while regional governments weigh the security benefits of U.S. support against concerns about escalation. Puerto Rico, situated several hundred nautical miles from the Venezuelan coast and long used as a logistics hub for U.S. operations, has once again become a central platform for maritime patrols, aerial surveillance and amphibious training evolutions such as those seen at Arroyo. Within this configuration, each new cycle of landings and airborne sorties on the island contributes both to operational readiness and to strategic signaling.
Viewed through the lens of potential Venezuelan contingencies, the specific mix of capabilities on display in Arroyo lends itself to a range of mission profiles rather than to a classic large-scale invasion scenario. Amphibious transport docks, LCUs and LARCs, supported by attack helicopters, are particularly suited to persistent maritime interdiction operations, allowing U.S. forces to board, search or disable small vessels, to secure coastal infrastructure and to establish temporary support points in nearby states such as Trinidad and Tobago or other eastern Caribbean partners. The same force package could support non-combatant evacuation operations from ports or beaches in the event of sudden instability in Venezuela or neighboring countries, extracting diplomatic personnel and civilians under the protection of helicopter gunships and naval escorts. For more demanding contingencies, limited raids or seizures of specific coastal sites linked to narcotics trafficking, surveillance or hostile activity are also conceivable, always subject to political authorization and international law.
At the same time, U.S. officials underline that amphibious forces remain essential for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief across the hurricane-prone Caribbean, where the ability to put engineering equipment, medical teams and supplies directly onto damaged shores can be decisive after a natural disaster. In practice, the Arroyo drills reinforce precisely this kind of flexibility, ensuring that the same set of platforms can be rapidly re-tasked depending on whether the next crisis is driven by narcotics violence, political confrontation or environmental catastrophe.
The landing and airborne training documented by Ricardo Arduengo on the beaches of Arroyo thus encapsulates the dual logic of the current U.S. posture in the Caribbean: a visible, technically sophisticated amphibious capability positioned close to Venezuela, but framed in terms of open-ended contingency planning rather than a declared campaign on Venezuelan soil. For regional observers, the message is clear: by perfecting the interplay between ships such as USS Fort Lauderdale, landing craft like LCU-1662, LARC vehicles and AH-1Z Vipers in Puerto Rico, the United States is ensuring that it can respond quickly along the Caribbean littoral while leaving the ultimate political choices about how that power will be used to civilian decision-makers.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.