Got this email yesterday.

Dr. Barnett, Introducing Africom in July issue of Esquire, you write: " America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon... What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa ." Digital network technologies and services will probably play a key role in furthering this common strategic mission for Africa and the USA. To that end, the deployment of a continental DNS infrastructure could be an invaluable asset. It would consist in both the physical communications network and the information services. And it would dynamically provide public and/or secure content to a broad range of stakeholders. Last but not the least, it would arguably ease the steep learning curve resulting from the dialog of different partners and cultures. The Armed Forces alone cannot carry out such a heavy burden. The real success of Africom shall depend on the participation civilian and military protagonists. Meanwhile, I have written to ICANN to propose the creation of .africa, a continental Internet domain similar to the already approved .eu and .asia domains. As you well know, through DARPA and the .mil domain, the Pentagon was the cradle of the TCP/IP Internet. Today, as the US military plans ahead for the Africom Command Region, I would like to seek your input on how the Pentagon and Enterra Solutions could work with Africa to turn .africa into reality. The result could be to the advantage of all parties. I am a pioneer member of the Internet Society, and in the late 1990s, I worked with the USAID Leland Initiative to seed the Internet in 21 African countries. Sincerely, Tierno S. Bah Promoter, .africa Project

Had Jenn set up phonecon and talked to this guy this a.m. while supervising my little ones on their bikes. I told the guy, Enterra's always interested in packages to prove out new standards of resilience in developing environments, but that we're so busy right now following up on the contracts we've won/are winning for the port of Philadelphia, Kurdistan, elsewhere in the national security community, that I need his thought-leadering to have reached the point where he can propose, "These are the four guys we need to go see here, here, here, and here, to get the critical mass for some money to make something happen here, which we can then pre-sell to all sorts of interested parties, Africom possibly being one." Between the Philly work on ports and the Development-in-a-Box stuff in Kurdistan, we think we're reaching a critical mass on the DiB concept (so much so that we're finding partners are already using the phrase to sell--ahem!), so it's just a matter of getting us close enough to executing something because--quite frankly--we've been too successful in thought-leadering on DiB recently. But it is a fascinating process that seems to feed on itself, this effort to engender a SysAdmin-Industrial-Complex. The more momentum you build on the subject, the more players want to join in. My question on this is, what do people know about the state of these kinds of efforts in Africa? My experience on "bringing the Internet to Africa" is over a dozen years old (going back to USAID work in the early-mid 1990s), and I feel out of date on the subject. Obviously a ton of stuff is going on, but as the recent story I blogged pointed out, the penetration rate remains very low (less than 5%), so curious about what the state of affairs is, from the perspective of knowledgeable people.