AFRICOM and China

ARTICLE: China to Strengthen Its Ties With Africa, By SHAI OSTER, Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2006

Great little piece by Shai Oster on China's rising profile in Africa, right down to Beijing promising plenty of Chinese SysAdmin troops.

If we get our act together there, maybe AFRICOM becomes seriously worth setting up.

Thanks to Barry Eisler for sending this in.

Comments

[Mark in Texas]

While our ground troops are pretty well committed for now, Africa would seem to present an opportunity to use our Navy ad Air Force as part of a multinational training exercise that would foster cooperation, train up some Sys-Admin capabilities and leave some substantial improvements in which ever African country hosted the exercise. Fuel is getting cheaper so it would not be too frivolous to fly engineer units and their equipment from whichever countries agree to participate to some volunteer Arfican nation to build a new airfield from scratch or upgrade an existing airfield to where it could handle high performance US aircraft. An operation like this would also involve ditching and grading roads in the neighborhood, upgrading the phone infrastructure, upgrading the electric infrastructure, upgrading or building bridges and a whole host of other things that involve coordination and cooperation both with the other forces in the exercise and with the locals. After the exercise is over, the improvements will remain.

Countries that have not been willing to commit troops to Iraq or Afghanistan might be more willing to participate in this sort of training exercise. Lessons will be learned, deficiencies in communications and coordination will be discovered and everybody involved will be that much better prepared to participate in a similar operation in the future.