Kavanagh:
Established in 2008, Africa Command is a legacy of the post-9/11 wars whose end is overdue. U.S. military activities under Africa Command’s purview — primarily train-and-assist missions in support of regional counter-terrorism—have run their course. They have failed to improve partner military capacity and are not needed to counter groups like al-Shabaab that pose little threat to U.S. security.
The Trump administration should curtail U.S. deployments to Africa, retaining a small presence in Djibouti, and dismantle Africa Command once U.S. regional operations end. Remaining intelligence and surveillance activities and crisis response in Africa should be transitioned to Central Command, which already has geographic and substantive ties to the Africa region. The Djibouti base, for instance, lies just adjacent to Central Command’s area of responsibility. In addition, the security challenges that plague the African continent are similar and often connected to those that confront Central Command’s leadership. Most importantly, the move would end definitively the U.S. “Global War on Terror” in Africa.
Friedman:
Africa Command should cease to exist. Making it a subordinate command within European Command isn’t enough. Saving money by reducing overhead isn’t the main reason to close it — because Africa Command shares component commands with European Command, closing it wouldn’t save much. The better reason to shutter Africa Command is to reinforce a more important policy shift that should occur: to make U.S. Africa policy less militarized.
Africa Command was imagined as a new sort of combatant command, one which would coordinate among civilian agencies more than military services and plan “not to wage war but to prevent it,” as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fatuously put it. That hasn’t occurred, and Africa Command has presided over various counter-terrorism missions mostly targeting insurgents with local objectives, without ending those wars.
The United States should stop seeing Africa as an arena of the war on terror or for military competition with China. Ideally, Africa Command’s closure would preview the end of all the geographic combatant commands, which have become lobbies for overreacting to threats in their region and for a kind of permanent war footing everywhere.
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