Don't worry about Africom, State

U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Hearing: Exploring The U.S. Africa Command And A New Strategic Relations

A good source on how Africom is shaking out.

Note also State's defensive tone.

But if CJTF-HOA is any indicator, State will remain in control far more than most alarmists assume, simply because Africom, like Southcom, will be severely resource-constrained.

Some automatically assume that means anything Africom does is a drop in the bucket, but that's wrong. The modeled behavior for local African militaries is everything, whereas it's the humanitarian aid that's marginal. In short, don't confuse means with ends.

Comments

[Mike R]

I was in attendance at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on USAFRICOM yesterday. I support the creation of this new command, but a few interesting points. First, while discussion seemed to come back to where to put the headquarters, I was interested in the fact that the only troops on the continent will be headquarters staff, not operational forces. Yet, the focus of the command will be conducting non kinetic capacity building efforts through its Theater Security Cooperation plan, but where are the troops going to come from to carry out these activities? Second, hearings are too politically correct to directly mention that State-DoD coordination is bad, but the fact that other agencies such as Treasury, State, and Ag are absent from "the field" was the elephant in the room. If coordination was good, we wouldn't even be considering making a interagency COCOM. Third, Senator Nelson (FL) noted that there are a lot of similarities between SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM, suggesting that DoD should consider implementing its "interagency COCOM" approach in both places at the same time.

[Tom Barnett]

If they led you to believe that only HQ personnel will be on continent, then I think you got the wrong impression.

Model is CJTF-HOA, which is about 1,600 personnel with 400 being command and 1,200 being guys and gals who do stuff on the ground, spread currently over three contingency operating locations (COLs in Bilate and Hurso, Ethiopia and Manda Bay in Kenya [a fourth in Ogaden Ethiopia was recently closed due to instability]). If you clone that model north, south, west, and central, that's maybe 2k command personnel and 6,000 on-the-ground personnel. Add AFRICOM central HQ, and maybe you're up to 9k total.