AFRICOM is losing more American forces to the pivot to great power competition:
U.S. Africa Command has begun cutting up to 10 percent of its forces from the continent in response to U.S. security challenges elsewhere, the top U.S. commander for Africa told reporters at the Munich Security Conference.
There are approximately 6,000 U.S. troops and 1,000 DoD civilians or contractors based throughout Africa, who are primarily tasked with training and exercising with partner African forces, said AFRICOM commander U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser.
AFRICOM has been chronically under resourced despite a host of terror groups on the continent. ...
But AFRICOM will not be growing. Instead it has been tasked to cut its forces in order to shift resources to prepare for potential future conflicts against Russia or China.
I've noted this order before. And now it is taking place.
Africa was already low on the priority list in the age of terror because the main threats were in CENTCOM ("Thank God for SOUTHCOM" is probably a saying in AFRICOM). Now Africa is even lower on the priority list. So making more efficient use of what is available is even more important.
I still think that a modularized auxiliary cruiser as I described in Military Review (calling the ship The AFRICOM Queen in honor of the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn movie The African Queen) would help American forces by providing persistent off-shore presence that can move around to many areas in the littorals of Africa.
Sure, this land-based hub serves the same function but it is of course stationary and distant from a lot of Africa:
U.S. Africa Command plans to begin routing flights to Accra, Ghana, as the hub of a new logistics network to ferry supplies and weapons to the patches of U.S. troops operating across the continent’s increasingly turbulent western region.
Mind you, places like Niger where AFRICOM is active against jihadis are too far from the littorals to benefit from The AFRICOM Queen. But Africa is huge with a lot of littoral regions. And making use of America's fewer forces in that large area make it easier to put forces in the interior.
