Trump and Obama's AFRICOM exposed

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom. Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the African continent were conducted by three separate military commands: the European Command, which had responsibility for most of the continent; the Central Command, which oversaw Egypt and the Horn of Africa region along with the Middle East and Central Asia; and the Pacific Command, which administered military ties with Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean.

Until the creation of Africom, the administration of U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands. All three were primarily concerned with other regions of the world that were of great importance to the United States on their own and had only a few middle-rank staff members dedicated to Africa. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States. But when the Bush administration declared that access to Africa’s oil supplies would henceforth be defined as a “strategic national interest” of the United States and proclaimed that America was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Africa’s status in U.S. national security policy and military affairs rose dramatically.

According to Theresa Whelan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs—the highest ranking Defense Department official with principal responsibility for Africa at the Pentagon, who has supervised U.S. military policy toward Africa for the Bush administration—Africom attained the status of a sub-unified command under the European Command on 1 October 2007, and is scheduled to be fully operational as a separate unified command no later than 1 October 2008. The process of creating the new command will be conducted by a special transition team — which will include officers from both the State Department and the Defense Department—that will carry out its work in Stuttgart, Germany, in coordination with the European Command.

BILATERAL AND MULTILATERAL JOINT TRAINING PROGRAMS AND MILITARY EXERCISES

The United States provides military training to African military personnel through a wide variety of training and education programs. In addition, it conducts military exercises in Africa jointly with African troops and also with the troops of its European allies to provide training to others and also to train its own forces for possible deployment to Africa in the future. These include the following:

FLINTLOCK 2005 AND 2007

These are Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) exercises conducted by units of the U.S. Army Special Forces and the U.S. Army Rangers, along with contingents from other units, to provide training experience both for American troops and for the troops of African countries (small numbers of European troops are also involved in these exercises). Flintlock 2005 was held in June 2005, when more than one thousand U.S. personnel were sent to North and West Africa for counter-terrorism exercises in Algeria, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad that involved more than three thousand local service members. In April 2007, U.S. Army Special Forces went to Niger for the first part of Flintlock 2007 and in late August 2007, some 350 American troops arrived in Mali for three weeks of Flintlock 2007 exercises with forces from Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH AFRICOM?

Africom became fully operational on 1 October 2008, just a month before the election of Senator Barack Obama to succeed President Bush. Thus, it will be up to president-elect Barack Obama to decide whether or not to follow the path marked out by the Bush administration—a strategy based on a determination to depend upon the use of military force in Africa and elsewhere to satisfy America’s continuing addiction to oil—or to chart a new path based on an international and multi-lateral partnership with African nations and with other countries that have a stake in the continent (including China and India) to promote sustainable economic development, democracy, and human rights in Africa and a new global energy order based on the use of clean, safe, and renewable resources.

The best indications that we have about what course the Obama administration will pursue on Africom come from the answers that the Senator Obama gave to the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation in response to their Presidential Town Hall Meeting Africa Questionnaire in October 2007 and in the remarks made by Whitney W. Schneidman (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton administration and adviser on Africa to the Obama campaign) to the Constituency for Africa’s 2008 Ronald H. Brown African Affairs Series at the National Press Club on 24 September 2008.

In his response to the Sullivan Foundation questionnaire, Senator Obama maintained that Africom “should serve to coordinate and synchronize our military activities with our other strategic objectives in Africa.” But he contended “there will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force.” And he went on to assert “having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action [18].”

This statement, when considered alongside Senator Obama’s campaign statements on the need to intensify U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and on the right of the United States to make unilateral military strikes into Pakistan against alleged members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations in violation of that country’s sovereignty, demonstrate that he is genuinely convinced of the necessity and legitimacy of the Global War on Terrorism and, at least implicitly, of the necessity and legitimacy of recent U.S. military attacks on Somalia. Since Vice Admiral Moeller cites the attacks on Somalia as a model for the type of activity that Africom expects to conduct all across the continent[19], this suggests that the Obama administration will continue to expand the entire spectrum of U.S. military operations in Africa, including increasing U.S. military involvement in the internal affairs of African countries (including both counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations) and the direct use of U.S. combat troops to intervene in African conflicts.

https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/africom-bush-obama

Africa’s leaders, along with everyone else interested in US-Africa relations, have waited eight months for US President Donald Trump’s administration to explain its Africa policy. We aren’t there yet.

But in recent weeks Trump has indicated the level and extent of his interest. And, senior African affairs officials at the State and Defence Departments are at last attempting publicly to outline US goals and objectives toward Africa. This, apparently without much guidance from their president.

Trump’s inaugural address to the UN General Assembly said little about Africa – barely one paragraph towards the end. One sentence praised African Union and UN-led peacekeeping missions for “invaluable contributions in stabilising conflicts in Africa.” A second praised America, which

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Tom Shannon, offered the first high level official statement on Africa. Shannon, a highly accomplished Foreign Service officer, emphasised policy continuity. But, he implicitly affirmed Trump’s apparent desire for minimal engagement in Africa.

Shannon and Acting Assistant Secretary Donald Yamamoto at a later session, stressed the four main pillars that have framed Africa policy for many years, would remain. These are:

• peace and security;
• counterterrorism;
• economic trade, investment and development; and,
• democracy and good governance.

They endorsed previous presidential initiatives, including specific references to former US President Barack Obama’s Feed the Future, Power Africa and the Young African Leaders Initiative. Their continuation, and at what levels, will depend on budget decisions. Trump’s initial recommendations, endorsed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, call for crippling cuts.

So far, the only new social development programme that Trump has endorsed is the World Bank’s global Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, championed by his daughter Ivanka. The US has donated USD$50 million toward its global start-up budget of USD$315 million. As Yamamoto noted at the September meeting, Africa could benefit from this initiative.

https://theconversation.com/trumps-africa-policy-is-still-incoherent-but-key-signals-are-emerging-85004

The scope of war-making authorities and powers available to the Trump administration depends on decisions made by the Obama administration. Two recent news reports shed some troubling light on its approach to the coming transition.

The Obama administration’s present mindset reflects a departure from its approach in the fall of 2012. In anticipation of an election it believed Republican challenger Mitt Romney might win, the Obama White House accelerated the development and implementation of a “drone rule book” that codified the procedures for drone strikes in non-battlefield settings. As one official worried aloud in November 2012, “There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands.”

The latest reporting suggests that, rather than restraining and limiting Trump, the Obama administration, in its final weeks in office, is further expanding the geographic scope of airstrikes, the nature of combatants who can be targeted, and the legal justification underpinning such strikes. The incoming president-elect, who has previously pledged to “bomb the hell out of ISIS,” will have the capabilities and authorities to do just that — for the Islamic State and other terrorist and militant armies.

On Friday, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Dan Lamothe revealed the creation of a new unit within the military’s highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). According to the reporting, this new entity, known as the “Counter-External Operations Task Force,” is authorized to conduct clandestine operations outside of the battlefields of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, without the approval of regional combatant commanders, such as Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of U.S. Central Command, who himself once led JSOC.

This essentially elevates U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) — within which JSOC resides — to a truly global combatant command, with the resources and authority to strike targets seemingly anywhere, rather than only after being placed under the authority of a regional combatant command. Obama administration lawyers and officials have always contended that there are no geographic limits to where U.S. forces may conduct operations against terrorism, with the battlefield being anywhere “from Boston to the FATA.” Now, it appears that it has set up an organizational command structure to support such limitless targeting. As Gibbons-Neff and Lamothe quote a defense official: “Layers have been stripped away for the purposes of stopping external networks. There has never been an ex-ops command team that works trans-regionally to stop attacks.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/28/obama-is-expanding-trumps-war-making-powers-on-his-way-out-the-door/

Operation Unified Protector - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Protector

Operation Unified Protector was a NATO operation in 2011 enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973 concerning the Libyan Civil War and adopted on 26 February and 17 March 2011, respectively. These resolutions imposed sanctions on key members of the Gaddafi government and authorized NATO to implement an arms embargo, a no-fly zone and to use all means necessary, short of foreign occupation, to protect Libyan civilians and civilian populated areas.[3]

The operation started on 23 March 2011 and gradually expanded during the following weeks, by integrating more and more elements of the multinational military intervention, which had started on 19 March in response to the same UN resolutions. As of 31 March 2011 it encompassed all international operations in Libya. NATO support was vital to the rebel victory over the forces loyal to Gaddafi. The operation officially ended on 31 October 2011, after the rebel leaders, formalized in the National Transitional Council, had declared Libya liberated on 23 October.

In response to the U.N. resolution, voted on 17 March 2011, an international coalition was established and naval and air forces were quickly deployed in and around the Mediterranean Sea. Two days later, on 19 March, France intervened in the imminent Second Battle of Benghazi with air strikes on Gaddafi armor and troops and eventually forced them back. On the same day 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from UK and US ships, further air strikes against ground targets were executed and a naval blockade was established. The initial coalition consisted of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Qatar, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The official names for the interventions by the coalition members are Opération Harmattan by France; Operation Ellamy by the United Kingdom; Operation Mobile for the Canadian participation and Operation Odyssey Dawn for the United States.

The U.S. initially coordinated the effort and took strategic and tactical command at UCC USAFRICOM, led by Carter Ham, and the Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn, led by Samuel J. Locklear aboard the command ship USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20), respectively. From there on command was split between the air and naval components of the operation at which level the different participating countries commanded their assets in accordance with their rules of engagement and through liaison officers.

After the initial intervention, the U.S. wanted to scale down their involvement significantly to a supporting role. Due to lack of consensus within NATO, the only other body capable of commanding a multinational operation of this size, however, this was not possible immediately. As consensus grew during the next days, NATO took more and more parts of the operation under its command until taking command of all military operations on 31 March.

Operation Odyssey Dawn - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Odyssey_Dawn

Operation Odyssey Dawn was the U.S. code name for the American role in the international military operation in Libya to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 during the initial period of 19–31 March 2011, which continued afterwards under NATO command as Operation Unified Protector. The initial operation implemented a no-fly zone that was proposed during the Libyan Civil War to prevent government forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi from carrying out air attacks on anti-Gaddafi forces. On 19 March 2011, several countries prepared to take immediate military action at a summit in Paris. Operations commenced on the same day with a strike by French fighter jets, then US and UK forces conducting strikes from ships and submarines via 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles and air assets bombing Gaddafi forces near Benghazi. The goal of coalition forces was to impose a no-fly zone for Libyan government forces.

The U.S. initially had strategic command of the military intervention, coordinated missions between coalition members and set up Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn on USS Mount Whitney for the tactical command and control in the area of operations. but passed complete military command of the operation to NATO and took up a support role on 31 March 2011. Prior to that, an agreement to pass command of the arms embargo to NATO was reached on 23 March, and a handover of enforcement of the no-fly zone to NATO was agreed to on 24 March and became effective the following day. With the handover of coalition command to NATO, Operation Odyssey Dawn remained the name for the activities of U.S. forces, and the coalition's objectives continued to be carried out under Operation Unified Protector. However, NATO's objectives did not include aiding the rebel forces' efforts to take control of territory held by the government.

AFRICOM TARGETS:

https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2017/08/africom-targets-shabaab-twice-in-southern-somalia.php

http://www.africom.mil/media-room/Article/6347/us-africa-command-targets-african-health-issues

http://www.africom.mil/what-we-do/security-cooperation/international-military-and-education-training

Trump's strategy on Africa and AFRICOM.

The 54 countries and its people are about as varied as it gets. It's a bit like lumping New York and Nuuk under one label.

Still, pundits and presidents, apparently, like to generalize. And US President Donald Trump capped his first year by denting his administration's aims in Africa. When Trump reportedly referred to African countries as "shithole," which he later denied, it was a trope familiar to citizens of this continent. The kind of sweeping and sometimes racist generalization of the continent and its people that is not uncommon in the US, Europe and Asia.

It's not the sentiment that's surprising -- it's that it reportedly came from the President of the United States.

And it broke the seal of silence from African governments.

Straight-talking Trump?

But does the shithole saga have any real impact on the US relationship with countries in Africa?

Yes and no.

Many are skeptical that it will have any lasting impact, particularly since African governments, like many others, are going to engage in realpolitik with America.

Generally, they are more concerned with results.

When Trump met with African leaders in September, he engaged in some characteristic "straight talk."

"Africa has tremendous business potential, I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich," he said.

Trump shocked some and raised uncomfortable questions about colonial-style exploitation. But it was probably exactly what many business leaders from Lagos to Johannesburg wanted to hear. And very different from what they were used to.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/20/africa/trump-africa-david-mckenzie-intl/index.html

Afrinca and the PMC's still

According to David Isebberg, at the YOUR-POC website, the website for exposing the programs of Private Military and Private Companies world wide.

Africa could be a goldmine for Private Military Contractors
https://www.your-poc.com/africa-goldmine-private-military-contractors/

BY: David Isenberg — In recent years, U.S. military operations in Africa have greatly expanded. Washington has established forward operating locations (FOL) and drone bases. It has helped various African countries, like Liberia, retrain their militaries. It has tried to track rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the East African terrorist group like Al-Shabaab. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has been involved in wide-ranging activities.

Thanks to the work of a very few journalists—like Nick Turse who has greatly enhanced our understanding of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Africa or Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post who has exposed problems at U.S. drone bases—there’s more information about these expanded operations.

But one aspect of U.S. military operations in Africa remains vastly under-covered and unappreciated: the role of private military and security contractors (PMSC).

Out of Africa

Domestic private security in Africa, which targets criminal activities, is widespread. But there are also a number of large transnational PMSCs who, along with their subsidiaries, guard mining sites, train national militaries and police, and provide security for development or humanitarian agencies. Even international development or UN peacekeeping/peacebuilding operations sometimes contract with PMSCs for various logistical support services.

It is fitting, in an ironic sense, that modern PMSCs should be operating in Africa. After all, Africa gave rise to much of the modern PMSC industry. The pioneer in the field was the South African-based Executive Outcomes (EO), which shut down in 1998 after having fought Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA group in Angola and the murderous Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Even earlier, mercenary “companies,” such as 5 Commando, fought in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere during the 1960s. Companies such as the Dutch VOC or the British South Africa Company were the tip of the spear for colonial occupation and exploitation,.

PMSCs are the U.S. military’s American Express card: it dare not deploy overseas without them. This is nowhere truer than in Africa. As a recent article in Geopolitics notes:

more than anywhere else in the world the US military presence in Africa is dependent upon PMCs that perform a variety of services, from transporting and housing personnel, to shipping materials and food, to providing medical support, to conducting surveillance… Soldiers operating out of remote facilities require services like food, fuel, beds, laundry, internet access and actionable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data that are provided by a heterogeneous web of contractors ranging from small African trucking firms, to American intelligence companies, to massive multinational corporations.

A contractor-provided plane and crew was crucial to a secret surveillance mission performed in support of France’s Operation Serval in Mali in 2013. That mission involved the deployment of a plane equipped with High Altitude Lidar Operations Experiment (HALOE) technology, developed by the Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA). HALOE reportedly allows “unprecedented access to high resolution 3D data” due to its ability to collect information “orders of magnitude faster and from much longer ranges than conventional methods.” By way of comparison, DARPA’s director estimates that the program could map half of Afghanistan in 90 days.

What Contracts Do Best

As the article points out, contractors are particularly useful for maintaining a low profile, particularly when it comes to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). When the U.S. military does this work itself it does so via large drones like Predators and Reapers, which means, large, noticeable, highly visible bases.

Contractors, on the other hand, are highly unobtrusive. That’s something highly desired by African states who wish to keep their relationship with the U.S. government off the radar. As the Geopolitics article noted:

A 2009 State Department cable from Burkina Faso, which was a key site for covert, contractor-based ISR flights over Mali and Mauritania under a programme called Creeksand—especially when flights from Mauritanian bases were temporarily suspended following a coup in 2008—relays a request by the government to move US planes to a different part of the airport in Oagadougou so as to “meet Burkina Faso’s objectives to maintain discretion concerning American presence.” It also states that Burkinese officials appreciate that “U.S. personnel were extremely discreet and did not attract undue attention.”

Similarly, a contractor-based ISR program named Tusker Sand, operating out of Entebbe, Uganda since 2009, has been part of a campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Contractors are also a key enabler for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) in Africa, helping them get to where they fight, which isn’t easy given Africa’s vast size. The Geopolitics article said:

This is especially true of SOF teams who conduct operations across a wide swath of the Sahel, Maghreb, Central and East Africa and rely heavily on US-based flight contractors. For instance, a 2013 solicitation for a Trans-Sahara short take-off and landing (STOL) contract to provide casualty evacuation and personnel and cargo airlift for Special Operations Command, Africa (SOCAFRICA) states that contractors will be required to fly both day and night missions from “improved and unimproved airfield landing zones” and that “it is anticipated that the most likely locations for missions… would be to: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia.

Finally, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors also provide base operations and life-support services to US military sites and operations in Africa. In some cases these contracts are awarded through established channels such as the U.S. Defense Department’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).

In other instances ad hoc solicitations or no-bid contracts are used… due to the small size of the base, temporary duration of operations, or difficulty in identifying qualified providers. In June 2015, for instance, the Marine Corps solicited bids to provide base-support services for up to four months for twenty-four soldiers conducting training exercises with the Ugandan military at Camp Singo in Uganda in the fall.The US frequently uses Camp Singo –which is located roughly seventy kilometres northwest of Kampala – for training exercises with Ugandan and other African military contingents, and has even established a small fenced compound with buildings, tents, water tanks and generators. But rather than permanently stationing troops there it rotates them in as desired, relying upon short-term contracts for base and life support. Ad hoc logistics contracting, in other words, facilitates AFRICOM’s stated goal of organising force posture “to maximize operational flexibility and agility.”