Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com & Eric Schmitt / The New York Times & MintPress News Desk – 2017-03-20 00:09:51
Trump Expands Special Forces Deployments Around Africa, Mideast
Trump Expands Special Forces
Deployments Around Africa, Mideast
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(March 19, 2017) — Reports from earlier this month that Pentagon has been increasing deployments of special forces around the Middle East and Africa appears to be continuing apace, with the most recent reports suggesting that President Trump has expanded the deployments into Central Africa, and is continuing the policy across the region.
The use of small-scale Special Forces as an alternative to larger deployments of regular combat soldiers became popular in the Obama Administration as a way to keep official troop levels comparatively low while getting into more and more military operations around the world.
While President Trump has been deploying larger numbers of regular ground troops into Syria and Iraq, the special force deployments have continued apace, and those familiar with the situation say he is likely to remove current restrictions on the special forces carrying out raids into Somalia.
But that is just likely to be one of many new places the US forces will be operating, with deployments in places like Niger, Cameroon, and Chad, along with a much larger number waiting in Djibouti, small operations against Islamist factions all around Africa seem to be planned.
Using Special Forces Against Terrorism,
Trump Seeks to Avoid Big Ground Wars
Eric Schmitt / The New York Times
MARA, Chad (March 19, 2017) — From Yemen to Syria to here in Central Africa, the Trump administration is relying on Special Operations forces to intensify its promised fight against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups as senior officials embrace an Obama-era strategy to minimize the American military’s footprint overseas.
In Africa, President Trump is expected to soon approve a Pentagon proposal to remove constraints on Special Operations airstrikes and raids in parts of Somalia to target suspected militants with the Shabab, an extremist group linked to Al Qaeda.
Critics say that the change — in one of the few rejections of President Barack Obama’s guidelines for the elite forces — would bypass rules that seek to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks and commando operations.
But in their two months in office, Trump officials have shown few other signs that they want to back away from Mr. Obama’s strategy to train, equip and otherwise support indigenous armies and security forces to fight their own wars instead of having to deploy large American forces to far-flung hot spots.
“Africans are at war; we’re not,” said Col. Kelly Smith, 47, a Green Beret commander who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and was a director of a counterterrorism exercise in Chad this month involving about 2,000 African and Western troops and trainers. “But we have a strategic interest in the success of partners.”
Mr. Trump came to office without a clearly articulated philosophy for using the military to fight terrorist groups. He had promised to be more aggressive in taking on the Islamic State — even suggesting during the presidential campaign that he had a secret plan — but had also signaled a desire to rein in the notion of the United States as the world’s peacekeeper and claimed at various points to have opposed the ground invasion of Iraq.
Now, surrounded by generals who have been at the center of a decade-long shift to rely on Special Operations forces to project power without the risks and costs of large ground wars, he is choosing to maintain the same approach but giving the Pentagon more latitude.
That leeway carries its own perils. Last week, the Pentagon went to unusual lengths to defend an airstrike in Syria that United States officials said killed dozens of Qaeda operatives at a meeting place — and not civilians at a mosque, as activists and local residents maintain.
It was yet another example of the mixed success Mr. Trump’s forays with special operators have had so far. An ill-fated raid in January by the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 against Qaeda fighters in Yemen marred the president’s first counterterrorism mission, five days after he became commander in chief.
In Mosul, however, Special Operations advisers are the American troops closest to the fight in Iraq to oust the Islamic State from its stronghold there. That is also likely to be the case in the impending battle to reclaim Raqqa in eastern Syria.
Mr. Trump is largely relying on the policies of his two immediate predecessors, Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush, who were also great advocates of Special Operations forces. On Mr. Obama’s orders, SEAL Team 6 commandos killed Osama bin Laden in his hide-out in Pakistan in 2011.
But Mr. Trump seems to have taken that appreciation and reliance to another level. He appointed a retired Marine Corps general, Jim Mattis, as defense secretary, and a three-star Army officer, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, as his national security adviser. Both men have extensive experience with Special Operations forces. And the National Security Council’s new senior director for counterterrorism, Christopher P. Costa, is a retired Special Forces intelligence officer.
Sharing an unusual window into the private conversations between Mr. Trump and his senior commanders, Army Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of the military’s Special Operations Command, said the president had made clear his urgent priority for counterterrorism missions conducted by the military’s elite forces during a visit to military headquarters in Tampa, Fla., last month.
“There were some pretty pointed questions about what winning looks like, and how are you going to get there,” General Thomas told a Special Operations conference outside Washington after the presidential visit.
And while the Pentagon could eventually send a few thousand more conventional troops to the fights in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, General Thomas warned that senior commanders feared that “more troops on the ground may mean you own the problem when you’re done with it.”
That concern gives weight to arguments for greater reliance on special operators as the Trump administration for now eschews larger deployments of conventional troops and proposes deep cuts in foreign aid and State Department budgets.
The global reach of special operators is widening. During the peak of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 13,000 Special Operations forces were deployed on missions across the globe, but a large majority were assigned to those two countries.
Now, more than half of the 8,600 elite troops overseas are posted outside the Middle East or South Asia, operating in 97 countries, according to the Special Operations Command.
Still, about one-third of the 6,000 American troops currently in Iraq and Syria are special operators, many of whom are advising local troops and militias on the front lines. About a quarter of the 8,400 American troops in Afghanistan are special operators.
In Africa, about one-third of the nearly 6,000 overall troops are Special Operations forces. The only permanent American installation on the continent is Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling base of 4,000 United States service members and civilians in Djibouti that serves as a hub for counterterrorism operations and training. The United States Air Force flies surveillance drones from small bases in Niger and Cameroon.
Elsewhere in Africa, the roles of special operators are varied, and their ranks are small, typically measured in the low dozens for specific missions. Between 200 and 300 Navy SEALs and other special operators work with African allies to hunt shadowy Shabab terrorists in Somalia.
As many as 100 Special Forces soldiers help African troops pursue the notorious leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony. And Navy SEALs are training Nigerian commandos for action in the oil-rich delta.
The United States is building a $50 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that is likely to open sometime next year to monitor Islamic State insurgents in a vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Chad.
Mr. Trump’s tough talk on terrorism has been well received here in Chad, where American Special Operations and military instructors from several Western nations finished an annual three-week counterterrorism training exercise last week.
Many African soldiers and security forces said they would welcome an even larger United States military presence to help combat myriad extremist threats. “Of course we’d like more,” said Hassan Zakari Mahamadou, a police commissioner from Niger. “US forces enhance us.”
The Pentagon has allocated about $250 million over two years to help train the armies and security forces of North, Central and West African countries.
But American aid and training alone — along with occasional secret unilateral strikes — will not be enough to defeat groups like Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the Islamic State, officials say.
“We could knock off all the ISIL and Boko Haram this afternoon,” Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the leader of the military’s Africa Command, told the Senate this month, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “But by the end week, so to speak, those ranks would be filled.”
Here on the outskirts of the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, last week, four flat-bottomed boats with mounted machine guns roared down the Chari River. The boats pulled up along the riverbank, just opposite neighboring Cameroon, and disgorged rifle-toting Chadian Special Antiterrorism Group forces and their American trainers.
In a hail of gunfire, shooting blanks, they stormed the thatched huts of a suspected Boko Haram bomb maker; seized laptops, cellphones and other material inside for clues on terrorist operations; and dashed back to the river, fending off a mock ambush on the way.
Piling back into their boats under covering fire, the Chadian commandos sped off in a drill that American and Chadian officers often play out for real in the nearby Lake Chad Basin area.
“Extremism is like a cancer,” said Brig. Gen. Zakaria Ngobongue, a senior Chadian officer who has trained in France and at Hurlburt Field, Fla., and was helping oversee the exercise. “We need to continue to fight it.”
AFRICOM’s Secret Empire:
US Military Turns Africa Into ‘Laboratory’ Of Modern Warfare
MintPress News Desk
WASHINGTON (December 11, 2015) — The Obama administration has overseen an unprecedented expansion of American military might on the African continent, with dozens of bases and outposts opening there since he took office.
A Nov. 17 [2015] investigation by Nick Turse, a journalist and American military scholar, found that the United States maintains at least 60 bases or military outposts throughout Africa, although not all are actively used at all times:
“Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered. These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries — more than 60% of the nations on the continent — many of them corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records.”
Even that figure does not fully encompass America’s reach in Africa. According to Turse’s sources, the US military operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché Offices” in 38 African countries, while 30 others have agreed to allow US forces to use their international airports as refueling centers.
Overall, Turse noted “that the US military has created a network of bases that goes far beyond what AFRICOM has disclosed to the American public, let alone to Africans.”
The military is slowly lifting the veil of secrecy over its actions in Africa. Turse reported:
“For years, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent.”
Richard Reeve, the director of the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a London-based security think tank, told Turse that the US is using AFRICOM as a “laboratory” where it can experiment with “a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces”:
“Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases… so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.”
After years of denials, the Pentagon has slowly begun admitting to the existence of some of its outposts, with a 2015 Pentagon list now including three “cooperative security locations,” ranging from a medical research facility in Egypt to a seaport in Kenya, and AFRICOM commander Gen. David Rodriguez admitted to the existence of 11 such sites in a May interview with military news publication Stars & Stripes.
This newfound transparency is likely a prelude to even more military expansion in Africa and elsewhere. On Thursday, The New York Times reported on a Pentagon plan to expand US military might in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, under the pretext of defending against Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the group also known as the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL) and other forms of Islamic extremism.
Under the proposal, submitted originally by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military would create “hub” bases on three continents by expanding existing bases and cooperative security locations, then using those hubs to create yet more outposts throughout surrounding areas.
Pentagon officials told the Times that, “[t]he hubs would range in size from about 500 American troops to 5,000 personnel, and the likely cost would be ‘several million dollars’ a year, mostly in personnel expenses.”
In his examination of the plan, Shadowproof‘s Dan Wright questioned “whether or not support for such adventurism can be found in a nation whose population is exhausted and frustrated by a decade of military blunders and failure.”
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