Last month, about a dozen al-Shabab fighters infiltrated the perimeter of a military base in Manda Bay, Kenya. One of them took aim with a rocket-propelled grenade, firing at a U.S. surveillance plane and touching off an hourslong firefight. When it was all over, the two American pilots of that plane and a U.S. soldier were dead, two other U.S. military personnel were wounded, six surveillance aircraft and helicopters were destroyed, and parts of the airfield were in flames.
Where there are U.S. bases, there is the potential for such attacks, because bases are not just launching pads for offensive military operations, but targets for them too. Since 9/11, the U.S. military has built a sprawling network of outposts in more than a dozen African countries. The Intercept has obtained U.S. military documents and a set of accompanying maps that provide the locations of these African bases in 2019, including the one at Manda Bay. These formerly secret documents, created by the Pentagon’s Africa Command and obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, offer an exclusive window into the footprint of American military operations in Africa.
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WNU Editor: It looks like there will be no change in US policy when it comes to Africa .... Here’s what Esper’s AFRICOM review has decided so far (Defense News).
TLDR -- how many people on the ground across these nations in Africa?
ReplyDeleteIt is amazing that Obama did nothing with the American footprint.
ReplyDeleteJust when we were about to get Kony's diseased carcass, Obama pulled out.
Africa needs more attention and it is not going to get it. Democrats have everything at a fever pitch. And I do mean that. It might be harder to measure slant or spiked stories, but it is very easy to count news stories on a topic, look at them a year later and decide if things were blown out of proportion for political purposes.
Right now the fever pitch story is the corona virus and what Trump is doing. Next week it will be economic slowdown fears form the corona virus. Next week Democrats will keep flinging more shit at the walls seeing if it will stick.
If you study the work of Jane Goodall and others, you know exactly how liberals operate.
As of October 2017 the U.S. military had 5,000 to 6,000 troops in Africa.
ReplyDelete"The United States has roughly 400 troops in Somalia.[3] American military forces work closely with African Union troops. Troops conduct raids with Somali troops and provide transport. American forces have engaged in firefights in self-defense and drone airstrikes have been called in to provide additional support."
If Al Shabaab has a few thousand rapist, murderers and gunmen in The Horn of Africa and the Kenyans, Somalis and Ethiopians can't handled it should we not have force to counter it?
Or should we let them take Poland?