Let's not be stupid in AFRICOM and pull out completely or draw down too much, okay?
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, cautioned that "any reduction in U.S. military presence…would have real and lasting negative consequences for our African partners." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) likewise expressed their own serious concerns about the matter in a bipartisan letter to Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper. ...
Over the past five years, our West African allies have attempted to live up to the current administration's belief that U.S. allies should shoulder a greater burden when it comes to their defense. They’ve done their part, but it's clear that they need more help to win this fight. Washington needs to step up or run the risk of creating a great power vacuum that Moscow and Beijing will not hesitate to exploit.
And it isn't just locals who we enable to kill jihadis by our presence. The French are in West Africa fighting the scum and are able to use our help. We should encourage that by maintaining capabilities to help friends fight jihadis.
China and Russia do have higher priority now. AFRICOM is an economy-of-force front, to be sure:
We need to be careful in allocating combat resources to our unified commands. With the small numbers involved, will reductions in AFRICOM in favor of EUCOM or INDOPACOM provide significant reinforcements to the latter two regions?
Or will those transfers simply cripple AFRICOM's ability to defend our interests and prevent big problems from emerging in Africa?
And if we need to move a smaller footprint around to put out the fires more effectively, I suggest a modularized auxiliary cruiser for power projection:
Let me suggest The AFRICOM Queen (as I advocated in Military Review) as an offshore platform that can move around the continent to quietly reinforce our small footprint from a discreet distance.
But AFRICOM is still a front that requires forces to leverage a bigger effort from allies and local friends. Don't let the scum regroup and come back to kill even more.
