Time has a piece today advancing the long-developing story of the Pentagon’s plans for an African Command:
In what may be the most glaring admission that the U.S. military needs to dramatically readjust how it will fight what it calls ‘the long war,’ the Pentagon is expected to announce soon that it will create an entirely new military command to focus on the globe’s most neglected region: Africa.
Pentagon sources say that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is close to approving plans for an African Command, which would establish a military organization to singlehandedly deal with the entire continent of Africa. It would be a sign of a significant strategic shift in Administration policy, reflecting the need to put more emphasis on proactive, preventative measures rather than maintaining a defensive posture designed for the Cold War.
That “significant strategic shift” is well under way. In 2002, the Pentagon set up the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa to support the war on terrorism in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen, and it has long been an open secret that some kind of new command structure was coming to deal with Africa.
Kevin Maurer of the Fayetteville Observer has been on this story, too, writing earlier in August that “Senior special operations officers believe that the creation of an African Command would alleviate the cumbersome bureaucracy that is slowing progress on the Horn of Africa.“
– Dan Dupont
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Let’s call it the Afrika Korps.
I’m surprised this has taken so long to happen. SOF have had small bases all over Africa for a long time.
I suppose that when you are the self-appointed world police, it is necessary to have strategically located HQ’s and substations.
As to what “progress on the Horn of Africa” amounts to, I guess that depends on your point of view.
“According to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.
…
The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo — even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.
For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been an American military colony for the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa “hosts” ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island’s second largest city. (Manhattan’s Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people’s countries, but no one — possibly not even the Pentagon — knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.”
This ‘long war’ business is a sham designed to increase federal power and military spending, which only serves to further enrich military industrialists and associated trans-nationals.
The real reason to create an African Command is the vested strategic and economic interest of the US in oil resources located in Libya, Nigeria, Chad, Algeria, Angola, etc.
Anticipating “success in the Middle East” seems beyond hopelessly optimistic – it is the most ostrich-like behavior I have ever seen.
The Africa Command is a strategic military reaction to the movement of Global Salafi-Jihadists terrorists; because they are and will head to the last
“I am more interested in fermenting the future of these regions using a variety of tools in order to create long term viable relationships.”
Agreed.
“Iraq being a good example. It
WarNerd, I must admit it’s hard to argue with horizontal thinking. Such two-dimensionality is clearly evident in your failure to respond to the specific points I raised questioning / countering your post. Your questionless embracing of dogmatic concepts only serves to reinforce this.
The future you project ignores many issues that make such ideas problematic at best including competition for limited resources, imbalances in consumption, historical precedents, climate change, etc. But raising these issues is futile because of your inability to address anything that conflicts with your ‘horizontal’ world view.
I don’t like addressing specific criticisms anymore because what’s the point? I