Tom got this email:

Tom,

I greatly enjoy your writing. I revisited PNM on my flight to Stuttgart several weeks ago for an AFRICOM business conference. As a regular attendee of similar conferences, I was interested in how the USG was planning to address the mostly humanitarian missions on the continent. The role they seem to be undertaking is the SysAdmin, but they can't seem to shake the Combatant out of Combatant Command.

I have been waiting for slides from the conference to appear on the website (www.africom.mil) and they should be there soon. The discussions were similar to the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command's meeting in March. Those slides should be available too.

I just thought you'd be interested and would love to see your comments on AFRICOM in the future.

Regards,

Tom replies:

Thanks for note.

Your diagnosis is expected. Enterra hired ADM Ulrich who ran Africa for EUCOM prior (old friend of mine) and he and I agree: right new wine suffering old bottle format, example being Congressional committees to which it reports (do you want HASC and SASC? Not really).

But this is best next iteration, meaning next conversations and debates are forced, so you take progress where you get it.

Good effect is example (cannibalizig effect): already SOUTHCOM proposing to mimic 2 dep commander structure.

So AFRICOM remains the experiment to watch.