Continental ambitions. Africom / CJTF-HOA

December 21, 2007
Continental ambitions

Africa has always been a backwater as far as the US military is concerned, a place where we once sought to counter Soviet influence but where little intrinsic strategic interest was discerned. Today, the situation is different.

A lot of new military initiatives between the United States and African nations are coming online in conjunction with the standing-up of the Pentagon’s newest regional combatant command, Africa Command, or Africom, which will be completed next year. One of the latest is the African Partnership Station scheme, which kicked off this fall, in which the US navy and Marine Corps will maintain a constant naval presence in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea.

Naturally, there is a lot of speculation globally regarding what Africom signals for the future of the US military and the so-called long war against radical extremism. Given Africa’s rising role in our nation’s oil imports, it’s tempting to view this new, permanent military presence off African shores as some sort of military "re-colonialisation" of Africa.

Just the opposite is true, however. Africom is neither a militarisation of US foreign policy in Africa nor an attempt to pull the region into some larger war on terrorism. By recognising the near- and mid-term potential for Africa’s historically rapid integration into the global economy, driven first and foremost by Asia’s huge and growing appetite for energy and raw materials, American ambitions regarding Africom are surprisingly focused: build up governance and security capacity on both national and regional scales so as to facilitate Africa’s successful migration into the ranks of the world’s emerging economies. The payoff is clear: the more African economies succeed, the less likely those societies will be to succumb to radicalising influences.

If you take for granted that today’s radical Salafi jihadist movement is largely centred in southwest Asia, then accelerating Africa’s integration into the global economy represents a strategic flanking manoeuvre designed to deny radical Islam’s successful penetration. At the end of the day, then, America’s strategic interests in Africa - as reflected in Africom - can be summed us thusly: keep civil strife down, build local capacity up and keep the radical jihadists out. Unstated in that formula - for now - is the logic of encouraging Asian (and Middle Eastern) firms "in". Admittedly, too many in the US national security establishment cannot see beyond their noses on the subject of counter-terrorism, but that form of strategic myopia will fade with time, especially as the plethora of aging cold warriors fade from the ranks.

Done effectively over the long haul, US military influence in the region would be self-negating. That is, the more successful we are in this strategy, the less influence we will have over local African governments. The end goal is simple: not permanent US military bases but African militaries and governments bolstered to the point where continental peacekeeping can be accomplished solely on the basis of indigenous capacity and regional cooperation.

Since 9/11, US military collaboration with African nations has focused on ground forces in the effort to build up local capacity for counter-terrorism operations and traditional civil-military aid projects. However, in the past couple of years, the US military’s efforts have expanded to address African states’ negligible maritime security capabilities. Africa’s coastal waters remain some of the most ungoverned - and ungovernable - spaces in the world. Recently, the CIA estimated that African coastal states lose more than $1bn annually to a cluster of illegal maritime activities, such as smuggling, fishery depletion, oil theft and piracy.

To combat these problems, the US navy has worked to extend a network of ground-based sensors used to track commercial shipping on the high seas. This network of sensors essentially exploits the existing Automatic Identification System used by the International Maritime Organisation to continuously track commercial ships over 300 gross tonnage. Beginning in North Africa and moving down the coast, vice admiral Harry Ulrich, commander of US naval forces in Europe, has successfully sold this scheme to numerous west African states, thus increasing local maritime transparency while knitting these states’ maritime security elements (navies, coast guards) into a global network of maritime monitoring.

A second expanding focus of US naval cooperation with African nations is found in the US Central Command’s long-standing effort at regional capacity building in the Horn of Africa, or Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA).

CJTF-HOA was first set up roughly five years ago as a Marine Corps-led maritime picket line to catch al-Qaida operatives fleeing the Persian Gulf for North Africa, but once it became apparent that no great flow was in the offing, the Marines moved ashore, setting up a small base in the port city of Djibouti and morphing their mission from capture-and-kill to local capacity-building. CJTF-HOA has since become the essential model for Africom, which is likely to replicate its de facto sub-unified command model in Africa’s northern, western, southern and central regions, corresponding to the African Union’s desire to stand up five regional peacekeeping brigades. In effect, Africom will represent a "franchising" of the CJTF-HOA model, complete with its innovative take on the so-called 3D approach of integrating defence, diplomacy and development activities into a synergistic whole.

How well will Africom fare in this regard? Time will tell. But it’s interesting how, when left to its own devices and located away from the global glare created by US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military, in the form of CJTF-HOA, has sought to subordinate itself so deeply within the existing state department and US Agency for International Development structures in east Africa. This bureaucratic integration is unprecedented, signaling the Pentagon’s desire to experiment with Africom, an ambition further certified by the recent announcement that Africom will have two deputy commanders, one military and one a state department civilian - another first-time development.

About two years ago, command of CJTF-HOA shifted from the Marines to the US navy. As a result of that service shift, CJTF-HOA has dramatically increased its maritime security cooperation effort off the Horn of Africa in recent months.

If you take into account these two expanding US efforts at maritime cooperation along Africa’s vast coastline, initiatives like the new African Partnership Station scheme are less signs of American imperialism and more a simple continuation of existing programmes previously pursued by European and Central commands. Much of Africom’s activity should be viewed in this evolutionary light, because - quite frankly - that’s the real promise that Africom represents for the US military itself: an experimental command that, if given enough bureaucratic leeway, should become a model for how all of America’s combatant commands evolve in this long war against radical extremism.

Thomas Barnett