Force disguised as law enforcement in Venezuela: graduated coercion, special operations and the strategic logic of leadership decapitation

The removal of Nicolás Maduro by US forces on 3 January 2026 is usually analysed as a problem of international law. This article treats it as a problem of military strategy. It asks how the United States built the campaign that ended with the seizure of a sitting head of state, and why a tactically successful decapitation produced neither the collapse of the Venezuelan regime nor a protracted war, but a rapid alignment of the successor government with Washington. Using process tracing across four phases of the campaign between September 2025 and January 2026, and following the outcomes through September 2026, the article finds that the operation was the final rung of a graduated coercion ladder that moved from lethal maritime interdiction, through a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers and a limited strike on port facilities, to a single-night raid on Caracas. The law enforcement framing of the raid was not only legal rhetoric; it worked as an escalation-control device that signalled limited aims to the Venezuelan armed forces and the chavista elite, and it shaped a small-footprint design consistent with the theory of special opera- tions. The original contribution of the article is the concept and model of custodial decapitation: a mode of leadership removal in which a state leader is seized alive and transferred to the captor's jurisdiction while the state apparatus is deliberately left intact, so that decapitation operates as compellence against the successor elite rather than as foreign-imposed regime change. Three mechanisms drive the model: demonstrated reach, custody as continuing leverage, and a pre- served apparatus able to deliver concessions. The Venezuelan sequence that followed, from the January opening of the oil sector to the 25-year energy agreement announced in August 2026, fits the model closely. The findings suggest that custodial decapitation lowers the costs that histori- cally made overt regime change rare, which makes it an attractive and destabilising template for great power coercion.