Militarization of foreign Aid?

By Charlie

AFRICOM’s troubles continue:

Stephanie Hanson from the Council on Foreign Relations interviews General William Ward, Commander, U.S. Africa Command and asks the following (very interesting) question:

In your posture statement to Congress in March, you discuss your strategic approach as one of "active security." Can you explain that idea and how you see it being executed in specific missions by Africom?
When I talked about "active security," as I mentioned in my posture statement, it's really a reflection of the day-to-day activities that go on that reflect our engagement with the nations of Africa where we have established policies that says, "There will be a military to military relationship with these organizations and nations." You are probably familiar with the term "phase zero." Phase-zero operations are those activities that you conduct in an environment where there's not conflict.

That is an interesting way of framing a strategy, perpetually in Phase 0 of an operation. The prospect of setting up a continent-wide stability and support operation seems a bit overwhelming, especially as many nations have been reluctant to serve as the host for AFRICOM HQ, which is currently in Stuttgart, Germany (which makes more sense than it would seem, as AFRICOM is being cleaved off of EUCOM).

Tom Barnett writes that AFRICOM HQ should be somewhere near Arlington:

As expected. No desire to favor any one of the five regions, as the CJTF-HOA gets franchised to the other four. Better to keep it out of Africa, and best--as I argue--to put it in Northern VA to highlight and enable it's "3D" approach of synergistically blending defense, diplomacy and development.

OK, but could we not enable a synergistic blending of defense, diplomacy and development from Morocco, CJTF-HOA, Kenya, or Ethiopia? I’m a big believer of connecting leaders to the terrain they are responsible for, and standing in the way of that will inherently create command-level issues. If the whole purpose of AFRICOM is a shaping operation, if we shape from the AO we operate in, it would be preferable to shaping it from inside the Beltway.

May 27, 2008 04:40 PM Africa