Malian special forces listen to instructions from a U.S. Special Forces
soldier on counter-ambush tactics in Kita, Mali, during a joint training
exercise. (photo: Alfred de Montesquiou/AP)
The US Military Is Conducting Secret Missions All Over Africa
By Nick Turse, VICE
27 October 17
U.S. troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises, programs, and engagements
per year, an average of nearly 10 missions per day, on the African
continent, according to the U.S. military's top commander for Africa,
General Thomas Waldhauser. The latest numbers, which the Pentagon confirmed
to VICE News, represent a dramatic increase in U.S. military activity
throughout Africa in the past decade, and the latest signal of America's
deepening and complicated ties on the continent.
With the White House and the Pentagon facing questions about an Oct. 4
ambush in Niger in which four U.S. Special Forces soldiers were killed,
Secretary of Defense James Mattis reportedly indicated to two senior members
of the Senate Armed Services Committee Friday that these numbers are only
likely to increase as the U.S. military shifts even greater attention to
counterterrorism in Africa.
"You're going to see more actions in Africa, not less," said Sen. Lindsey
Graham after the briefing. "You're going to see more aggression by the
United States toward our enemies, not less; you're going to have decisions
being made not in the White House but out in the field."
But the U.S. military has already seen significant action in Africa, where
its growth has been sudden and explosive. When U.S. Africa Command, the
umbrella organization for U.S. military operations on the continent, first
became operational in 2008, it inherited 172 missions, activities, programs,
and exercises from other combatant commands. Five years in, that number shot
up to 546.
Today's figure of 3,500 marks an astounding 1,900 percent increase since the
command was activated less than a decade ago, and suggests a major expansion
of U.S. military activities on the African continent. (VICE News requested
2016 numbers, but AFRICOM failed to answer phone calls or respond to email
requests.)
"The huge increase in U.S. military missions in Africa over the past few
years represents nothing less than a shadow war being waged on the
continent," said William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security
Project at the Center for International Policy.
These developments stand in stark contrast to early assurances that
AFRICOM's efforts would be focused on diplomacy and aid. In the opening days
of the command, the assistant secretary of defense for African affairs,
Theresa Whelan, said it would not "reflect a U.S. intent to engage
kinetically in Africa." AFRICOM, she said, was not "about fighting wars."
But an increasing number of AFRICOM's missions have the appearance of just
that. The command has launched 500 airstrikes in Libya in the last year
alone, and U.S. forces have regularly carried out drone attacks and commando
raids in Somalia.
"This military-heavy policy," said Hartung, "risks drawing the United States
more deeply into local and regional conflicts in Africa and generating a
backlash that could actually aid terrorist organizations in their
recruitment."
Officially, the Pentagon says the 3,500 missions consist primarily of
training and advisory efforts to build the "defense capabilities" of local
partner forces, including the use of counterterrorism assistance efforts
such as the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program and Trans-Sahara
Counterterrorism Partnership, according to spokesperson Maj. Audricia
Harris. (Harris also confirmed that Waldhauser's figures were accurate).
These programs are aimed at a plethora of terror groups that have sprung up
across the continent since the 2000s, including 19 "active militant Islamist
groups," - such as al Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin
region, and the Islamic State group in the Greater Sahara - in AFRICOM's
area of operations, according to the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic
Studies. The ultimate aim, according to AFRICOM, is to defeat "transnational
threats in order to advance U.S. national interests and promote regional
security, stability, and prosperity."
But AFRICOM uses extremely broad language to describe training missions,
including those in which troops are killed in action. Missions carried out
under the rubric of "security assistance," "security cooperation,"
"train-and-equip" or "building partner capacity" - can be indistinguishable
from actual combat.
"There is a notion,, in some circles at least, that training missions are
'safe,' and that U.S. troops are not exposed to the same level of risk as if
they were engaged in direct combat," said Hartung. "There may be an element
of truth in this, but when push comes to shove, training missions can easily
cross the line into combat operations."
In May, for example, a Navy SEAL was killed by al Shabaab militants in
Somalia while "assisting partner forces," according to AFRICOM. Earlier this
month, four Special Forces soldiers were killed in an ambush while providing
"advice and assistance" to local forces in Niger.
U.S. troop deaths or scandals are frequently the only mechanism by which
Americans come to know about military deployments to African nations like
Niger, which according to Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Audricia Harris is home
to more than 800 U.S. military personnel.
But Niger is hardly exceptional. Every day, 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. personnel
are deployed across the African continent.
These near-constant training exercises, missions, and activities with troops
from Benin and Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Chad, Gabon and Guinea Bissau, not
to mention Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Togo and
Uganda, among other nations, remain largely unknown to most Americans. So is
the string of U.S. bases and outposts stretching from Djibouti to Tunisia,
Cameroon to Kenya, Ghana to Niger.
"We've seen a significant increase in U.S. military training to the African
continent in recent years," Colby Goodman, the director of the Security
Assistance Monitor, which tracks U.S. spending on foreign militaries, told
VICE News. The number of African troops trained by U.S. military personnel
jumped 89 percent, Goodman notes, from 22,825 trained in 2014 to at least
42,815 individuals a year later.
"I think we run the risk of working ourselves in more deeply - building
dependence, rather than independence."
Even before Mattis informed Sen. Graham and Sen. John McCain, the chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, there were indications that the
counterterror missions would expand. This month, Donald Yamamoto, the acting
assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, told the House Foreign
Affairs Committee that the Trump administration's proposed $5.2 billion
African aid budget would address "key priorities" such as "assist[ing]
partner nations to defeat ISIS branches and affiliates and other terrorist
organization threats and networks in Mali and the Sahel, Nigeria and the
Lake Chad Basin, Somalia and the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere."
Recently, the acting U.S. Army Africa commander, Brig. Gen. Gene LeBoeuf,
noted that so-called "theater security cooperation" activities - missions
designed to "build relationships that promote specified U.S. interests" -
are set to rise from 186 this year to 271 in 2018, with about 80 percent
taking place in the Lake Chad Basin nations of Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and
Niger. The recent attack on U.S. forces in Niger, believed to have been
carried out by the Mali-based Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, suggest
these missions pose increasing risks.
Experts warn this surge in U.S. military activities lacks strategic
planning, and that providing training and equipment to such poor nations
with fragile governments can result in greater instability.
"First, it's very easy for our activities to overwhelm a country's
absorptive capacity for aid, which tends to result in elevated levels of
corruption," said Rebecca Zimmerman, a national security and foreign policy
researcher at the RAND Corporation. "Next, by disproportionately funding the
military and security apparatuses of these governments, we run the risk of
militarizing or securitizing the country - elevating the militaries to a
place of increased power relative to civilian government."
Zimmerman warned this is particularly risky "in countries where there is
inadequate civilian control of the military." In 2012, for example, a
U.S.-trained Army captain, Amadou Sanogo, overthrew Mali's elected
government. Two years later, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, another U.S.-trained
officer, seized power in Burkina Faso.
"With all of this," Zimmerman said, "I think we run the risk of working
ourselves in more deeply - building dependence rather than independence -
which will make it hard for our forces to eventually conclude their
mission."
Spokespersons for Africa Command would not comment about the missions or
such concerns, ignoring multiple emails from, and even hanging up on, this
reporter.
"The U.S. government would do well to do serious risk assessments about its
military activities in Africa," Goodman warned. "These risk assessments must
include the risks of U.S. military activities contributing to terrorist
recruitment, especially in the Sahel, through increased U.S. military
presence and by supporting corrupt military forces."
Hartung shared similar concerns and said it was critical for the public to
stay informed of the military's often quiet expansion. "Congress and the
public need to pay more attention to far-flung U.S. military train-and-equip
missions, both in Africa and globally. They can too often sow the seeds of
greater U.S. military involvement," he said.
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