Africom: problems and possible remedies.

• Author: Marks, Edward
• Position: United States Africa Command - Report

Editor's Note: The establishment of the U.S. Africa Command raises some questions regarding the role of the military in U.S. Africa policy, as it will be performing many tasks generally thought of as the responsibility of State and other civilian agencies; and because its resources are much superior, it risks displacing embassies as the primary de facto American interlocutor with African governments. This essay discusses these issues and offers specific suggestions on how AFRICOM can address them and work effectively with State, AID, and other government agencies.--Ed.

The establishment of the new geographic unified command--U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM--appears to be an attempt to deal with three perceived problems:

* American policy towards Africa;

* American policy for dealing with terrorism in Africa;

* Department of Defense desire to fill an organizational lacuna.

Let me comment on these questions in reverse order, beginning with the one that may be the least important or significant.

Since World War II the U.S. military have developed an organizational structure to manage their enormous, complicated, and very resource-dominated world and to fulfill their mission of defending the United States. The core of this concern is the primary military mission of war fighting. Millions of people and vast amounts of materiel have to be managed in a manner which must be centralized and decentralized at the same time. Defining this process is an organizational and war fighting doctrine which divides their world view into three levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Reflecting this perspective, the military side of the Department of Defense is organized hierarchically into a chain of command headed by the President and the Secretary of Defense, then a collection of unified commands, each responsible for a geographic area (e.g., the Pacific region, as in the U.S. Pacific Command, PACOM) or a mission (e.g., the Special Operations Command, SOCOM). This system began somewhat serendipitously in WWII with CINCPAC, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific, and was over the years expanded until only Africa remained an identifiable geographic region without a designated U.S. military command. U.S. military concerns in Africa were run out of the three adjoining geographic commands: EUCOM, CENTCOM, and PACOM.

In a sense, then, one block on the Power Point slide remained unfilled, and several years ago DoD decided to fill it by creating a military geographic command for Africa, hence AFRICOM.

Therefore, from a purely bureaucratic point of view, assuming that DoD continues to utilize this "COCOM" system, the creation of AFRICOM makes sense. If Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific all have a military command devoted to them, why not Africa? As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it to the Senate Armed Services Committee: Creating AFRICOM "will enable us to have a more effective and integrated approach than the current arrangement of dividing Africa between [different regional commands]."

AFRICOM Raises Questions

However, the introduction of AFRICOM has raised a number of questions arising from the definition of is mission, description of its organization and resources, and certain other "administrative" characteristics such as the venue of its headquarters. (1)

* The COCOMs' original mission of war fighting has been expanded over recent years to increasingly include humanitarian assistance and post-conflict reconstruction, although these are not uniquely DoD missions but those in which the military are involved--at least in theory--as only one player on the U.S government team. Unfortunately, in recent years they have too often been the only player called upon by the "coach."

* Even counter-terrorism, while clearly a sub-set of the traditional military mission, is not a unique DoD mission and not primarily the responsibility of the geographic commands such as AFRICOM. Recent Pentagon policy directives have stated that "irregular warfare" (which includes military counter-terrorism) is "likely to be conducted by Special Operations forces ..."

* Plans for actually locating AFRICOM's headquarters on the African continent raise significant political and practical questions.

* There are questions about the need for such a large and prominent military organization given the comparatively limited policy and operational objectives the United States has in Africa. Unified commands are expensive bureaucratic organizations headed by very senior officers. AFRICOM will...