Tomorrow's Battlefield

U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa

Nick Turse

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781608464630
• eBook ISBN: 9781608465002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America's newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military's spreading secret wars in Africa.

1

America’s Shadow Wars in Africa: Obama’s Scramble for Africa

July 12, 2012

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing US military presence in Africa.

Few in the United States know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”

In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make. They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.

On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes. The same is true in other African countries. The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti, among others.

According to Pat Barnes, a spokesman for US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Camp Lemonnier serves as the only official U.S. base on the continent. “There are more than 2,000 U.S. personnel stationed there,” he told TomDispatch by email. “The primary AFRICOM organization at Camp Lemonnier is Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). CJTF-HOA’s efforts are focused in East Africa and they work with partner nations to assist them in strengthening their defense capabilities.”

Barnes also noted that Department of Defense personnel are assigned to US embassies across Africa, including twenty-one individual Offices of Security Cooperation responsible for facilitating military-to-military activities with “partner nations.” He characterized the forces involved as small teams carrying out pinpoint missions. Barnes did admit that in “several locations in Africa, AFRICOM has a small and temporary presence of personnel. In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or coordinate with host-nation personnel.”

Shadow Wars

In 2003, when CJTF-HOA was first set up there, it was indeed true that the only major US outpost in Africa was Camp Lemonnier. In the ensuing years, in quiet and largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their forces across the continent. Today—official designations aside—the United States maintains a surprising number of bases in Africa. And “strengthening” African armies turns out to be a truly elastic rubric for what’s going on.

Under President Obama, in fact, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: the 2011 war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of thirty ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and US commando raids; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders. And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

To support these mushrooming missions, near-constant training operations, and alliance-building joint exercises, outposts of all sorts are sprouting continent-wide, connected by a sprawling shadow logistics network. Most American bases in Africa are still small and austere, but growing ever larger and more permanent in appearance. For example, photographs from 2011 of Ethiopia’s Camp Gilbert, examined by TomDispatch, show a base filled with air-conditioned tents, metal shipping containers, fifty-five-gallon drums, and other gear strapped to pallets, but also recreation facilities with TVs and videogames and a well-appointed gym filled with stationary bikes, free weights, and other equipment.

Continental Drift

After 9/11, the US military moved into three major regions in significant ways: South Asia (primarily Afghanistan), the Middle East (primarily Iraq), and the Horn of Africa. The United States is drawing down in Afghanistan and has left Iraq. Africa, however, remains a growth opportunity for the Pentagon.

The United States is now involved, directly and by proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding list of regional enemies. They include al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa; the Islamist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria; al-Qaeda-linked militants in post-Qaddafi Libya; Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan; Mali’s Islamist Rebels of the Ansar al-Dine, al-Shabaab in Somalia; and guerrillas from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

An investigation by the Washington Post revealed that contractor-operated surveillance aircraft based out of Entebbe, Uganda, are scouring the territory used by Kony’s LRA at the Pentagon’s behest, and that one hundred to two hundred US commandos share a base with the Kenyan military at Manda Bay. Additionally, US drones are being flown out of Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia and from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while drones and F-15 fighter-bombers have been operating out of Camp Lemonnier as part of the shadow wars being waged by the US military and the CIA in Yemen and Somalia. Surveillance planes used for spy missions over Mali, Mauritania, and the Sahara Desert are also flying missions from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and plans are reportedly in the works for a similar base in the newborn nation of South Sudan.

US Special Operations forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating posts on the continent, including one in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and others in Nzara in South Sudan and Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States also has had troops deployed in Mali, despite having officially suspended military relations with that country following a coup.

In addition, according to research by TomDispatch, the US Navy has a forward operating location, manned mostly by Seabees, Civil Affairs personnel, and force-protection troops, known as Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. As well as Camp Lemonnier, the US military also maintains another hole-and-corner outpost in Djibouti, a navy port facility that lacks even a name. AFRICOM did not respond to requests for further information on these posts.

Additionally, US Special Operations forces are engaged in missions against the LRA from a rugged camp in Obo in the Central African Republic, but little is said about that base either. “US military personnel working with regional militaries in the hunt for Joseph Kony are guests of the African security forces comprising the regional counter-LRA effort,” Barnes told me. “Specifically in Obo, the troops live in a small camp and work with partner nation troops at a Ugandan facility that operates at the invitation of the government of the Central African Republic.”

That’s still just part of the story. U.S. troops are also working at sites inside Uganda. Early in 2012, marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12) trained soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force, which not only runs missions in the Central African Republic but also acts as a proxy force for the United States in Somalia in the battle against the Islamist militants known as al-Shabaab. They now supply the majority of the troops to the African Union Mission protecting the U.S.-supported government in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

In the spring of 2012, marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in Somalia. In the first half of that year, members of Task Force Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment, of the Texas National Guard took part in a training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu, Burundi; SPMAGTF-12 sent trainers to Djibouti to work with an elite local army unit, while other marines traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching riot-control techniques to Liberia’s military as part of a State Department–directed effort to rebuild that force.

In addition, the United States conducted counterterrorism training and equipped militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia. AFRICOM also had fourteen major joint-training exercises in 2012, including missions in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria.

The size of US forces conducting these joint exercises and training missions fluctuates, but Barnes told me that, “on an average basis, there are approximately 5,000 US Military and DoD personnel working across the continent” at any one time.

Air Africa

In 2012, the Washington Post revealed that since at least 2009, the “practice of hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory . . . has been a cornerstone of the US military’s secret activities on the continent.” Dubbed Tusker Sand, the operation consists of contractors flying from Entebbe airport in Uganda and a handful of other airfields. They pilot turbo-prop planes that look innocuous but are packed with sophisticated surveillance gear.

America’s mercenary spies in Africa are, however, just part of the story.

While the Pentagon canceled an analogous drone surveillance program dubbed Tusker Wing, it has spent millions of dollars to upgrade the civilian airport at Arba Minch, Ethiopia, to enable drone missions to be flown from it. Infrastructure to support such operations has been relatively cheap and easy to construct, but a much more daunting problem looms—one intimately connected to the New Spice Route.

“Marco Polo wasn’t just an explorer,” army planner Chris Zahner explained at a conference in Djibouti in 2013. “He was also a logistician developing logistics nodes along the Silk Road. Now let’s do something similar where the queen of Sheba traveled.” Paeans to bygone luminaries aside, the reasons for ...

Table of contents

• Tomorrow’s Battlefield
• Introduction: Tomorrow’s Battlefield
• 1. America’s Shadow Wars in Africa: Obama’s Scramble for Africa
• 2. Blowback Central: The Terror Diaspora
• 3. AFRICOM’s Gigantic “Small Footprint”: The Pivot to Africa
• 4. American Proxy Wars in Africa: A New Model for Expeditionary Warfare
• 5. Nonstop Ops: US Military Averaging More Than a Mission a Day in Africa
• 6. AFRICOM Becomes a “War-Fighting Combatant Command”: Going to War on the Sly
• 7. The Pentagon, Libya, and Tomorrow’s Blowback Today: How Not to End Violence in a War-Torn Land
• 8. How “Benghazi” Birthed the New Normal in Africa: A Secret African Mission and an African Mission That’s No Secret
• 9. An East–West Showdown: China, America, and a New Cold War in Africa
• 10. Christmas in July and the Collapse of America’s Great African Experiment: As a Man-Made Famine Looms, Christmas Comes Early to South Sudan
• 11. American Monuments to Failure in Africa? How Not to Win Hearts and Minds
• 12. American “Success” and the Rise of West African Piracy: Pirates of the Gulf of Guinea
• 13. The Outpost That Doesn’t Exist in the Country You Can’t Locate: A Base Camp, an Authoritarian Regime, and the Future of US Blowback in Africa
• Afterword: Finding Barack Obama in South Sudan
• Appendix: US Africa Command Debates TomDispatch: An Exchange on the Nature of the US Military Presence in Africa
• Acknowledgments
• About Nick Turse