From: Tsegai Emmanuel (emmanuel@gram.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 01 2008 - 14:08:22 EDT
U.S.: AFRICOM Outside of Africa
Stratfor Today » May 5, 2008 | 2143 GMT
Soldiers boarding ship bound for U.S. Navy's Africa Partnership Station
JOSE LUIS ROCA/AFP/Getty Images
Soldiers boarding the USS Fort McHenry to participate in the U.S. Navy's Africa Partnership Station
Summary
The Pentagon's newest combatant command, Africa Command, will not relocate its headquarters to Africa, despite its efforts to do so, media reported May 4. Retaining its central operations headquarters in Germany will not, however, prevent the Pentagon from continuing the kind of work it has already accomplished in Africa.
Analysis
Related Special Topic Pages
* U.S. Military Involvement in Africa <http://www.stratfor.com/theme/u_s_military_involvement_africa>
* U.S. Military Dominance <http://www.stratfor.com/theme/u_s_military_dominance>
The Pentagon's newest combatant command - Africa Command (AFRICOM) - will not relocate its headquarters to Africa, media reported May 4. Though political opposition in Africa likely forced AFRICOM's hand, the Pentagon will continue the kind of work it has already accomplished through the Africa Partnership Station and counterterrorism cooperation in the Horn of Africa.
The United States launched AFRICOM in October 2007 to consolidate Pentagon activity in Africa under a single combatant command. Until then, that activity had been spread out among three commands: Central (CENTCOM, which will retain responsibility for activities in Egypt), European and Pacific. AFRICOM is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany (where it was originally only provisionally based), but the command's planners intended to move its headquarters to Africa by October. Planners also intended to establish a sub-office in each of Africa's regions: North, West, Central, East and South.
However, governments in Africa - particularly Nigeria and South Africa, two of the continent's leading geopolitical powers - put up considerable political opposition to the establishment of AFRICOM headquarters in Africa. Despite the high level of recent U.S. attention directed toward Africa - including U.S. President George W. Bush's five-nation tour in February <http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/africa_u_s_security_and_bushs_africa_tour> - and several African presidents' visits to the White House (including the presidents of Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Uganda), Liberia was the only country believed eager to host AFRICOM. Given that Liberia is far from areas of core AFRICOM interests, AFRICOM planners likely resigned themselves to the realization that at this point, a formal headquarters in the region would be more trouble than it is worth. AFRICOM planners have not ruled out establishing a headquarters in Africa in the future, however.
Maintaining its central operations headquarters in Germany will not prevent AFRICOM from continuing the kind of work the Pentagon has already accomplished in Africa, however. The U.S. Navy's Africa Partnership Station <http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/united_states_u_s_navy_and_africa> program is the kind of operation Pentagon planners will rely on. The Pentagon will also continue deploying forces under the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa headquarters at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti to support counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa region. With the jihadist insurgency in Somalia expected to heat up, efforts to boost the Somalian government's counterterrorism capabilities <http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/somalia_islamists_insurgency_and_u_s_aid> will continue, as will targeted airstrikes against Islamist insurgent leaders <http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/somalia_u_s_hits_insurgent_commander> .
Nor will it be the only command based outside its area of responsibility; CENTCOM is headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and operates from numerous hubs in the Middle East in support of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. AFRICOM will carry out an even more decentralized set of missions (not to mention ones of lower intensity), and its ability to coordinate operations flexibly and adaptively is more important than the location of its headquarters. With its aim to rationalize and cultivate cooperative training and security endeavors in a decentralized fashion and in coordination with both other governmental and nongovernmental agencies, much of AFRICOM's work was going to be done away from headquarters and through liaison offices inside U.S. embassies anyway. However, without facilities in Africa, the real test for AFRICOM will be future contingency arrangements - preparing critical airfields and port facilities to facilitate crisis intervention or humanitarian assistance should the
need arise. Gaining necessary provisional facilities in Africa's five regions will be an important litmus test for AFRICOM's sustainability on the continent.
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