Breaking News
U.S. Marines Stage Large-Scale Beach Landing in Puerto Rico to Bolster Caribbean Deterrence.
U.S. Marines executed a large-scale beach landing in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, during expanded amphibious drills under U.S. Southern Command. The high-visibility operation signals a broader U.S. effort to reinforce deterrence and rapid response capacity across the Caribbean.
On December 9, 2025, a drone photograph by Reuters’ Ricardo Arduengo captured a U.S. Navy Landing Craft Utility pushing ashore at Arroyo on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, Marines spilling onto the beach during expanded amphibious drills under U.S. Southern Command. Filed early December 10, the image shows Marines wading through the surf as the LCU drops its bow ramp and briefly turns a quiet shoreline into a military staging point. The activity builds on earlier ship-to-shore rehearsals documented in our Army Recognition report, where smaller teams, vehicles and helicopters practiced coordinated landings in the same area. Viewed together, the operations underscore how Puerto Rico has become a working laboratory for U.S. amphibious tactics and a visible marker of American resolve in the Caribbean.
U.S. Marines staged a large beach landing in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, during expanded SOUTHCOM amphibious drills, signaling a broader push to strengthen deterrence and rapid response across the Caribbean (Picture Source: Ricardo Arduengo)
The latest images from Arroyo mark a clear progression from earlier drills. In the first waves observed on December 5, LCU-1662 was photographed shuttling individual Marines, Humvees, a bulldozer loaded with ammunition crates and other cargo to the beach, under the watch of AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters and shore-based security teams. Four days later, Arduengo’s drone shot shows the same class of landing craft packed almost rail-to-rail with infantry, transforming the exercise from a logistics-focused ship-to-shore sequence into something closer to a battalion-sized beach landing. The craft’s ramp forms a narrow corridor through which successive files of Marines step into waist-deep water, weapons and packs held high, before fanning out across the surf zone. This shift from moving mainly vehicles to moving a dense mass of troops suggests that planners are testing not just the mechanics of landing craft, but also the tempo at which combat units can be delivered, organized and pushed inland from an austere, unsecured coastline.
From a military-technical standpoint, the scene exemplifies the essence of contemporary U.S. amphibious warfare doctrine. The amphibious transport dock USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD-28), along with its embarked units, serves as a mobile sea base, hosting command elements, aviation assets, and the vehicles and sustainment supplies required by a reinforced Marine battalion. Landing Craft Utility (LCU) vessels such as LCU-1662 provide the heavy lift capability to establish the crucial link to shore, enabling the delivery of not only infantry, but also Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, engineering assets, and palletized cargo directly onto austere beaches lacking pier infrastructure. Supporting this effort, LARC amphibious resupply craft and helicopter gunships complete the final logistical and security layer, transporting ammunition and fuel inland while maintaining aerial overwatch. In Arroyo, this integrated architecture is repeatedly exercised through multiple load and offload cycles, underscoring an operational focus on refining the entire ship-to-shore movement and protection chain rather than conducting a singular demonstration landing.
From a geostrategic perspective, the selection of Puerto Rico, specifically Arroyo, is deliberate. Located several hundred nautical miles from Venezuela, the island provides sheltered anchorages, airfields, and training beaches within reach of South American sea lanes, while remaining under U.S. jurisdiction. These exercises, conducted under Operation Southern Spear, are officially framed as counternarcotics but widely interpreted as a deterrence signal to Caracas and other regional actors. Since late summer, U.S. forces have rotated an aircraft carrier strike group, amphibious ready groups, and thousands of personnel through the southern Caribbean, raising the regional presence to more than 10,000 troops by open‑source estimates. In this context, a massed Marine landing, captured in high‑resolution imagery and circulated globally, reinforces the narrative of a nation demonstrating its capacity to project power along the Caribbean littoral.
Beyond immediate U.S.–Venezuela tensions, the Arroyo operations carry wider implications for regional security and for the evolution of U.S. amphibious forces. The drills align closely with the Marine Corps’ shift toward Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and distributed maritime operations, which emphasize small, rapidly deployable units dispersed across islands and coastal areas, able to host sensors, air-defense systems or anti-ship missiles for limited periods before relocating. By proving that LCUs, LARCs and helicopters can repeatedly establish and dismantle beach-based logistics nodes under realistic sea conditions, the Arroyo training validates key elements of that concept in a real geostrategic setting rather than a domestic training range. At the same time, the same skill set is directly transferable to non-combatant evacuation missions or large-scale disaster relief across a hurricane-prone region, where the ability to land engineering vehicles, medical teams and bulk supplies on damaged or isolated shores may be as politically significant as any show of force.
As U.S. Marines conduct amphibious landings, the exercise signals that the Caribbean once again holds strategic value for amphibious operations. The United States is refining capabilities for missions ranging from counternarcotics and evacuations to limited coastal raids, leveraging the same naval and air assets active off Arroyo. By expanding recent ship‑to‑shore and close‑air‑support drills into a full‑scale landing, Washington demonstrates that its Caribbean posture is operational, not hypothetical, leaving only political will, not capability, as the deciding factor in any future crisis.