COMMENTARY: Around Cuba, Washington sounds out military police, not strike units

Six lines in a message

The September 25 list

A combat sustainment support battalion.

An engineer battalion. An expeditionary sustainment command. A medical brigade. A forward resuscitative surgical team.

A military police brigade.

That is the list in an internal Army Reserve message, revealed by CBS News on September 25 at 9:36 a.m. Six types of formations that would fall under U.S. Southern Command. Responses were due no later than September 25.

Those who will look for their unit

Somewhere, in a reserve unit’s drill hall, someone reads this list and looks for the name of their own unit.

A reservist is a civilian first. He has a job. He has rent. He has a child to drive to school.

He wears the uniform one weekend a month. He knows what an email asking who is available means.

None of these six lines is a strike unit.

All of them are units that stay.

A list that doesn’t shoot already says how long you stay.

90 to 120 days

The message’s calendar

The message sets a timeline. The units would “possibly [be] needed in 90-120 days.”

Counted from September 25, that gives a window opening around December 24 and closing around January 23.

Christmas Eve. The dead of winter.

This is not a deployment order. CBS specifies that no unit has received orders. With no vote in Congress authorizing force against Cuba, it is a question put to units: who would be ready, and when.

What a timeline reveals

A raid is prepared in secret, with whatever is at hand. A presence is prepared by counting who can leave, and for how many months.

Ninety days is the time it takes to recall civilians, train them, equip them. The time to warn an employer.

Christmas, for a reservist’s family, is a date. For a planner, it is a cell in a spreadsheet.

The timeline doesn’t have the rhythm of a strike. It has the rhythm of settling in.

Ninety days is a calendar, not a single night.

What the list doesn’t name

Cuba isn’t on it

It has to be said before anything else.

The message does not mention Cuba. CBS writes so in black and white.

The message doesn’t say how many troops would be needed.

Nor where they would go. Southern Command covers Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Nor what for, except through the nature of its units.

And in what CBS reports, it carries no decision-maker’s name.

The link to the island comes from several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. According to them, the request is part of continued military planning aimed at Cuba.

That is a reported fact. Not an established one.

Southern Command stays silent

For reasons of operational security, Southern Command does not comment on possible movements or deployment timelines, it told CBS. The Army Reserve did not respond before publication.

No public document. No decision announced.

Southern Command is not an abstraction for all that. Just on Thursday, according to CBS, U.S. soldiers and DEA agents were helping Ecuador arrest more than 30 members of a Mexican cartel.

It is already at work. Elsewhere.

What remains is a list, a deadline and a thirty-day window.

The message doesn’t say where. It already says how.

The military police line

The line that says everything

Of these six lines, one is enough to read the others.

A military police brigade handles security and detention, according to CBS’s description.

Whose security? Whose detention?

You don’t detain anyone from a bomber. You don’t guard an intersection from an aircraft carrier.

Whoever plans for military police plans to stay.

An org chart of presence

I’ll state my reading early, so you know where I’m reading from.

This list is first a calendar of presence. It doesn’t describe a short, surgical operation, home before the evening news. It describes weeks, perhaps months, on foreign soil, with people to guard, to treat, to house.

This isn’t a trial of intentions. It is a reading of an org chart.

I can be wrong about the intent. Not about the list. It is written.

Military police don’t ship out for a round trip.

Surgeons, engineers, logistics

What a forward team treats

The forward resuscitative surgical team performs emergency operations close to the field.

The medical brigade organizes care across an entire region.

You plan for surgeons where you plan for wounded. American wounded. And others.

What the engineers build

The engineer battalion opens roads and builds camps. The expeditionary sustainment command oversees logistics, CBS specifies. The combat sustainment support battalion coordinates supply.

Read backwards, the list says what would be needed.

Roads will be needed. Camps will be needed. Meals, every day, for thousands of people. Hospital beds. Cells.

The last line weighs more than the others.

And yet none of these units appears in the speeches. The speeches talk about freedom.

Engineers build what a strike never plans for.

July, the 101st

What had already been studied

The September list has a July precedent.

That summer, according to CBS, planners examined several options, including an Army-led air assault with thousands of troops, assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, the only one trained for that mission.

Thousands. Not a special forces team.

The officials interviewed in July already insisted: nothing indicated that the president or the Pentagon had decided to go ahead.

The seabed and the sky

Earlier in the year, CBS reports, U.S. forces carried out reconnaissance of the island’s seabed and maritime approaches. Air components were placed on heightened alert. Those plans did not materialize.

Dives. Maps. Aircraft ready. Then nothing.

July, the assault. September, those who stay after the assault.

The sequence reads without commentary.

First those who arrive. Then those who stay.

What U.S. intelligence says

A terrain, not a standalone threat

There is a document the administration doesn’t quote from the rostrum.

The U.S. intelligence community’s 2026 annual threat assessment describes Cuba as an environment that enables more powerful rivals, rather than as an independent strategic threat, CBS reports.

The rivals are named by the administration itself: it accuses Havana of tightening ties with Russia, China and Iran.

A foothold for Beijing, Moscow, Tehran

That is the real Western issue with Cuba. Not the island. Those who settle on it.

In May, according to CBS, U.S. intelligence was already assessing how Cuba would react to U.S. military action.

Beijing, Moscow, Tehran. Three powers that threaten the West. An island that serves as their foothold.

Countering those ties is in the Western interest. I say it plainly.

And yet a military police brigade for an enabling environment raises a question of proportion. You don’t station military police in a country to cut a phone line to Beijing.

Intelligence says terrain. The list says a stay.

What Trump said at the UN

September 22, at the UN

Three days before the list, Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly.

Freedom will come to Cuba, he said, according to the text the White House published on September 22. The United States will no longer allow a threat to take hold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, it will use its unrivalled military power.

He says his administration seeks fundamental change in Cuba. He says the communist government will fall, CBS reports. He says Marco Rubio is deep in negotiations with Havana.

The Cuban delegation walks out.

What he said in March

In March, CBS recalls, Trump spoke of the honour of taking Cuba, one way or another, freeing it or taking it, and said he could do what he wanted with it. Later that month, he announced that Cuba would be next.

On the other side, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel vows to respond to any attack and accuses Washington of aggression and economic warfare, by blocking oil imports.

CBS ties this line to the so-called Donroe doctrine, a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine aimed at foreign adversaries. One hemisphere. One master of the house. No rival allowed.

The rostrum speaks of freedom and negotiation. The list speaks of detention and surgery.

The speech promises freedom. The list plans for guarding.

The September 17 sanctions

Eleven targets

On September 17, Marco Rubio signed a new round of sanctions under Executive Order 14404, designating 11 targets.

Four state companies that exploit Cuban nickel. Four military firms researching weapons systems, naval capabilities and combat simulation. Three officers who run them.

The State Department accuses the regime of handing the island’s resources to a narrow, corrupt military elite, leaving ordinary Cubans without reliable electricity or food.

Targeting the apparatus, not the people

That act can be defended.

Targeting military firms and the officers who run them hits the apparatus, not the population. It is the kind of pressure that can accompany a negotiation.

And yet the same week, the Army Reserve asks who would be ready in 90 days.

Targeted sanctions and a stabilization list are not playing from the same score.

A sanction can be lifted. A military presence, rarely.

The Pentagon plans everything

Rick Scott, April 28

Here is the objection the administration would sign.

The Pentagon plans everything, all the time. An availability survey is not an order. The message doesn’t even name Cuba. And on April 28, in the Senate, Republican Rick Scott called the question moot: the United States is engaged in no hostilities with Cuba, in his view.

Planning is an army’s job. Worrying about it confuses prudence with intent.

Southern Command uses the same language about its other operations. On the boat strikes, its spokesperson Steven McLoud insisted, according to The Intercept, that every operation is planned and carried out in full compliance with the legal framework.

No decision, a composition

All of that is true. And that is exactly why the composition matters.

Precautionary planning for strikes doesn’t need a military police brigade. It doesn’t need a sustainment command for a whole region.

The limit is real: nothing in this file proves a decision has been made. I don’t write that.

I write that the list describes the day after a decision nobody has yet announced.

Planning isn’t deciding. Choosing whom to plan for is.

Surgeons for the day after

Planning for the day after

Now for what troubles those who oppose any action.

An army that plans for surgeons, engineers and police also plans not to leave a country without order, without care, without roads, if it goes in.

That is more responsible than a strike with no tomorrow.

And the planning hasn’t always led anywhere. The reconnaissance and the air alert earlier in the year did not materialize, according to CBS. Neither did the assault studied in July. Twice, the file stayed a file.

It can stay one a third time.

The negotiating door

Another troubling fact: the administration says it is seeking a diplomatic way out. In January, Marco Rubio told Congress he would like to see the regime change, CBS reported in April. He did not rule out military action. He didn’t announce it either.

Washington and its opponents agree on at least one point: Cubans lack electricity and food. They disagree on who is responsible.

That is true, and it doesn’t change this. A stabilization list prepared during negotiations weighs on the negotiations.

Planning the day after is serious. Hiding it isn’t.

Christmas Eve

Those who would go

The message’s window opens around December 24.

A reservist doesn’t leave a barracks. He leaves a home. The tree up in the living room, the suitcase in the hallway, the phone buzzing on the kitchen counter.

These aren’t career soldiers. They are people with another job, who signed up to serve when called.

Those waiting across the water

Across the water is an island where, by Washington’s own account, electricity is short and so is food.

And there is a sea where the U.S. campaign of strikes on boats, launched on September 2, 2025, has left more than 230 dead in 70 strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, according to CBS. The Intercept counted more than 225 dead a year after the first strike. Some legal experts cited by CBS call these strikes illegal extrajudicial executions.

The first, on September 2, 2025, targeted a boat with eleven men aboard, according to The Intercept. Two survivors clung to debris for about 45 minutes. A second strike ended their lives.

Forty-five minutes.

They got no 90-day notice.

Nobody surveyed them.

A deadline for some. None for the others.

Congress in the hallway

Two attempts

Congress tried.

On April 28, Senate Republicans blocked Tim Kaine’s war powers resolution on Cuba, CBS reported. Kaine said he had never heard that Cuba posed an imminent threat to the United States.

On May 22, Nydia Velázquez and Gregory Meeks introduced House Concurrent Resolution 106. It would direct the president to remove the armed forces from any hostilities against Cuba not authorized by a declaration of war or a specific authorization.

It was referred to committee.

Adam Schiff, co-sponsor of the Senate resolution, had already accused Trump, according to Senator Kaine’s release, of bypassing Congress to strike Iran and Venezuela.

Two precedents. An island in sight.

The silence of the calendar

The Army Reserve list foresees 90 to 120 days. The House text was introduced four months ago.

An army surveying its units moves faster than a Congress that has voted no authorization to use force against Cuba.

That isn’t an accusation. It is a speed.

Congress votes budgets. It votes pay. It has not voted for this stay.

The list moves forward. The law waits in the hallway.

Who will pay for the stay

Three acts, three dates

I judge the acts, one by one.

The September 17 sanctions against Cuba’s military apparatus: a defensible act, targeted, reversible.

The September 22 speech: a promise of freedom backed by a threat of force, without a word on what force would cost.

The September 25 list: an admission, through the org chart, that force would cost a stay. If that cost stays hidden from the public that will pay it, it is a bad move.

A stay has a price. It is counted in months. In suspended paycheques. In hospital beds. In cells.

In the pages I read, nobody has put a public figure on it.

A stay with no stated length

Before 90 days become an order, who will have told reservists’ families, and Cubans, how long this stay would last?

The list has already answered, in its own way.

It put the military police last.

Nobody surveys military police for a single night.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• White House — Donald Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly, September 22, 2026
• State Department — new sanctions on Cuba’s military apparatus, September 17, 2026
• House of Representatives — H. Con. Res. 106 on war powers regarding Cuba, May 22, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• CBS News — the military lays groundwork for possible action around Cuba, September 25, 2026
• CBS News — the Senate blocks the Kaine resolution on Cuba, April 28, 2026
• The Intercept — a year of strikes on boats, September 2, 2026