U.S. Africa command: a new strategic paradigm?

Military Review, Jan-Feb, 2008 by Sean McFate

This new command will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and help to create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa. Africa Command will enhance our efforts to help bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa. (1)

--President George W. Bush

ON 6 FEBRUARY 2007, the president announced the establishment of a tenth unified combatant command called Africa Command, or "AFRICOM." Its area of responsibility will cover Africa, and it will have an unprecedented number of interagency civilians in leadership roles (including a civilian deputy commander). This new command's objective will be to enhance Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to assist African partners in achieving a more stable environment through security cooperation.

Yet questions abound. AFRICOM's vision, as outlined by the president on the day of its public unveiling, is anomalous among unified commands. Words like "development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth" are atypical of military missions, which traditionally center on fighting and winning wars. In many ways, AFRICOM is a post-Cold War experiment that radically rethinks security in the early 21st century based on peace-building lessons learned since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Will it work? This article explores possibilities by analyzing AFRICOM's origins, timing, strategy, and composition as well as the early challenges that will confront the nascent command.

Why AFRICOM?

AFRICOM originated as an internal administrative change within DOD that remedies "an outdated arrangement left over from the Cold War," in the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. (2) Or, in the words of Ambassador Robert Loftis, the former senior State Department member of the AFRICOM transition team, it was created because "Africa is more important to us strategically and deserves to be viewed through its own lens." (3) That lens is the new unified command.

Unified commands, or combatant commands, were instituted during the Cold War to better manage military forces for possible armed confrontation with the Soviet Union and its proxies. Today, they are prisms through which the Pentagon views the world. Each command is responsible for coordinating, integrating, and managing all Defense assets and operations in its designated area of responsibility, per the Unified Command Plan. This plan is regularly reviewed, modified as required, and approved by the president.

The unified command design has proven problematic for DOD's involvement in Africa, a continent not viewed as strategically significant during the Cold War. That DOD never designated a unified command for Africa evinces the want of concern for one of the largest and most conflict-prone continents on the planet. Instead, DOD divided African coverage between three unified commands: European Command (EUCOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), and Pacific Command (PACOM). This lack of focus had several deleterious effects.

The first effect is that Africa was never a number-one priority for any unified command. Each viewed its strategic imperative as being elsewhere, leaving Africa as a secondary or even tertiary concern. For example, EUCOM's strategic center of gravity has always been Europe, with the overwhelming majority of its forces, staff, and resources dedicated to that continent, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Second, the three-part division of responsibility violates the principle of unity of command, increasing the likelihood of an uncoordinated DOD effort in Africa. This disunity can occur especially at the "seams" between unified commands, for instance, a hypothetical U.S. military response to the crisis in the Darfur region might be complicated because the area of interest straddles the EUCOM and CENT COM boundary, causing coordination challenges. (4)

Third, owing to historical disinterest, DOD never developed a sizable cadre of dedicated African experts. Only within the past decade has DOD invested in the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (a think tank akin to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany) to support the development of U.S. strategic policy towards Africa.

Lastly, Africa has never benefited from the advocacy of a four-star commander whose undiluted mandate includes helping policymakers understand the perspectives of African countries and formulate effective African security policy.

Taken together, these four deficiencies resulted in a disjointed and hindered approach towards Africa that lacked primacy within the Pentagon and, by extension, U.S. interagency networks.

Partly in response to this unwarranted lack of attention, DOD decided to redraw the unified command landscape by creating AFRICOM (see figure 1). As Secretary Gates testified before the Senate, creating AFRICOM "will enable us to have a more effective and integrated approach than the current arrangement of dividing Africa between [different unified commands]." (5) AFRICOM combines under a single unified command all but one of the countries conventionally considered "African." (Egypt is the exception, owing to its relationship with the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. It remains covered by CENTCOM).