The Caracas operation suggests cyber was part of the plan – just not the whole operation

The dominant narrative has framed the Jan. 3 Caracas power outage during the mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as a “precision cyberattack.” But publicly available information points to a more complicated picture: videos, photographs, and accounts published from Caracas show significant physical damage to at least three Venezuelan substations. Experts who reviewed that material say the observed kinetic damage could, on its own, account for the outages—raising questions about how much of the outage can be confidently attributed to cyber activity alone.

These experts say Operation Absolute Resolve appears to have involved more than a stand-alone “cyber blackout,” despite the framing of many early accounts. In their view, cyber operations may have played some role, but the visible physical attacks alone could plausibly explain the outages—and that kinetic dimension is largely absent from the dominant narrative.

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a former director of operations at US Indo-Pacific Command and now a senior cybersecurity expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, described the outage to CyberScoop as part of “a campaign that likely took months to source cyber targets, days to work kinetic targets, and then integrated them into a single campaign plan that took a night.”

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