The entire North of the continent of Africa seems to be melting down right now, with the underlying causes being drought, famine and competition to exploit natural resources. There are Egypt’s calvinball twists and other Arab Spring revolts, as well as unrest and chaos in Mali, and Sudan, and Somalia. I was marginally aware of the rebellion in DRCongo, where the rebels are making inroads in the east – possibly with Rwandan help. Ditto the ongoing violence in Nigeria, both tribal and religious. A revolt in Chad with possible backing from Sudan, albeit one that’s apparently incompetent so far, is news to me but just adds to the general tangle of armed insurrections, wars and revolts.
Tom Engelhart writes that America may be helping the growing chaos along, not through malice but simply through the misapplication of militarized foreign policy.
The truth is that such ”œsolutions,” first tested in the Greater Middle East, are now being applied (even if, as yet, in far more modest ways) from Africa to Central America. In Africa, I suspect you could track the growing destabilization of parts of that continent to the setting up of a U.S. command for the region (Africom) in 2007 and in subsequent years the slow movement of drones, special forces operatives, private contractors, and others into a region that already has problems enough.
Here’s a 2012 American reality then: as a great power, the U.S. has an increasingly limited toolkit, into which it is reaching far more often for ever more similar tools. The idea that the globe is a chessboard, that Washington is in control of the game, and that each militarized move it makes will have a reasonably predictable result couldn’t be more dangerous. The evidence of the last decade is clear enough: there is little less predictable or more likely to go awry than the application of military force and militarized solutions, which are cumulatively incendiary in unexpected ways, and in the end threaten to set whole regions on fire. None of this, however, seems to register in Washington.
The Obama administration has ordered more than a dozen airbases established across the continent, with the central hub in Burkini Faso, for surveillance flights as far as the Sahara and the equatorial jungles. Using the AUMF for authority and in the name of the great war on terror, thousands of US servicemen and units of US special forces troops are deployed in Uganda, the Central African Republic, DR Congo, Cameroon and Sudan. We’re not paying enough attention, as a nation, to what is being done in our names in Africa.
…thousands of personnel is just flat out wrong. Similarly “more than a dozen airbases” sounds scary as hell, right up until one realizes what they really are – a guarantee of decent fuel on these existing civil and military bases and a secured hanger where they can swap out avionics in the birds (usually RC-12s) when they need to.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Africom admits to a couple of hundred special forces in those nations. I’d suspect there’s a sizeable contingent of support, either servicemen or contractors, wouldn’t you?
…all up to the countries mentioned in the article. Those are predominantly JSOC assets – very high tooth to tail ratio. Even assuming that they were talking about 100 operators, there’s no way one gets up to the 3,100 to 4,100 personnel asserted in that source. There’s more forces in other countries running FID missions, but I frankly wouldn’t be surprised if one can’t break 4 figures from all this without factoring in the embassy people and places like Egypt. These are just not very big teams – no need for them to be.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
That’s not counting the 2,000 strong deployment to Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa at the United States Naval Expeditionary Base in Djibouti. Currently, the task force has an assigned area of interest that includes Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Seychelles and Kenya. Outside this Combined Joint Operating Area, the CJTF-HOA has operations in Mauritius, Comoros, Liberia, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. A fair bit of overlap there.
And then there’s this from the Army Times, Jun 8 2012:
“A brigade will deploy to Africa next year in a pilot program that assigns brigades on a rotational basis to regions around the globe, the Army announced in May.
Roughly 3,000 soldiers — and likely more — are expected to serve tours across the continent in 2013, training foreign militaries and aiding locals.
As part of a “regionally aligned force concept,†soldiers will live and work among Africans in safe communities approved by the U.S. government, said Maj. Gen. David R. Hogg, head of U.S. Army Africa.”
If there aren’t a few thousand US troops in Africa already, there soon will be.
…a) they’ve ramped it up significantly in the last 6 months (their most recent report was under 200 – as in, there were more people in Egypt than Djibouti), and b) that still ain’t in your source (which, if you look around at what folks say about it is dodgy as hell). When we have everybody saying 100 guys and one source saying 30 to 40 times more, that source had better be pretty good and offer some significant detail before we should be hanging much off it.
So if we’re looking at larger deployments in the future than previously was the case, what’s the “Tomgram” hypothesis on offer? A number of troops measured in the hundreds and whatever’s been run through Djibouti at various times have de-stabilized a continent? The establishment of a headquarters that isn’t so far as I recall yet even physically on the continent and the promise of larger deployments in the future have collectively de-stabilized a continent? I’m having a hard time accepting that stacked up against other competing views, like pretty good sized pieces of Africa just being pretty generally less stable places over a long period.
I’m pretty receptive to the idea that the direct action ops out of Djibouti have a lot more downsides than folks inside the puzzle palace want to acknowledge, but this is simply taking two things that one doesn’t like the look of and asserting that they go together without any good evidence of how (and even that assumes that it’s two things: although they assert that destabilization has grown over the relevant period, I don’t see any good evidence marshalled – this says to me to be wary that this isn’t one of those rhetorically convenient Internet-facts everyone “knows”).
FID (which is the mission these guys will be on), if done judiciously and well – and those numbers sound promising – is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Mysterious fatal crash offers rare look at U.S. commando presence in Mali
Craig Whitlock/WaPo July 8
“In pre-dawn darkness, a ÂToyota Land Cruiser skidded off a bridge in North Africa in the spring, plunging into the Niger River. When rescuers arrived, they found the bodies of three U.S. Army commandos — alongside three dead women.
What the men were doing in the impoverished country of Mali, and why they were still there a month after the United States suspended military relations with its government, is at the crux of a mystery that officials have not fully explained even 10 weeks later.
At the very least, the April 20 accident exposed a team of Special Operations forces that had been working for months in Mali, a Saharan country racked by civil war and a rising Islamist insurgency. More broadly, the crash has provided a rare glimpse of elite U.S. commando units in North Africa, where they have been secretly engaged in counterterrorism actions against al-Qaeda affiliates.
The Obama administration has not publicly acknowledged the existence of the missions, although it has spoken in general about plans to rely on Special Operations forces as a cornerstone of its global counterterrorism strategy. In recent years, the Pentagon has swelled the ranks and resources of the Special Operations Command, which includes such units as the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force, even as the overall number of U.S. troops is shrinking.
At the same time, the crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “
…don’t necessarily add up to much that’s actually all that “exciting”. As they’ve transitioned to having more operations capability abroad, they’ve started having more collectors permanently attached to the embassies.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
You don’t find even the security risk noteworthy?
Two of those guys were intercept or communications guys, people the DoD didn’t want to release much info about. Dave, I respect the hell out of you but some days you’re just too ready to give the MIC the benefit of the doubt (just as some days I’m too ready to give them too little).
…found himself in the company of a prostitute – even those on “top sekret” missions – I’d be a rich man.
The only thing that I’m seeing that indicates that there’s anything remotely “secret squirrel” here is the Intelligence and Security guy. The captain was commissioned as a Sigs officer (crossed flags on his lapels), but was posted to Civil Affairs. Unless he qualified fairly recently, he wasn’t SF qualified in spite of what is said in the article (lots of journalists don’t appear to know the difference between “Special Forces” and “Special Operations Forces” – Civil Affairs is one, but not the other). Yes, there are lots of folks in Civil Affairs who are Q course graduates, but they tend to be older and frequently Civil Affairs is just Civil Affairs (the “soft power” of special operations). The fact that they coughed up the Civil Affairs guys’ names but foot dragged on the Intelligence and Security guy says to me that the CA folks were on a “green” mission. The Intelligence and Security guy, who knows. As I say, they’ve been putting more emphasis on tactical collection out of host embassies of late (the gear’s gotten a lot better and more compact) and that would fit quite nicely.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs