US considers new military command for Africa

I don't quite understand the psychology of doing this, America already has a presence globally, why bother establishing a military presence there? If anything this will cause MORE animosity towards the USA's image in developing countries. If Bush wants to consider sending anything down there to help it should be care or aid packages.

www.nzherald.co.nz...

Because they're not. All this means is that there will be just one group responsible for coordinating all the intelligence, and anything else dealing with Africa. This has nothing to do with deploying troops there. Right now there are three seperate groups that monitor things going on in Africa. It's very easy to miss something going on there. By creating an African command, there is only one group that will monitor everything coming out of Africa.

beacuse america and britain have to stick their big noses in every place

Yes Zaphod is correct, if you look at the image below you can see that USCENTCOM, USEUCOM and USPACOM all share responsibility for the African region. This is problematic especially since information gathering, sharing and processing would be more efficient under one command then under three separate commands. And the US already has some bases in Africa but very little troops there, this does not effect that it just consolidates responsibility and command for that region under one organization.



Map

US World Bases

Other Sources
US Unified Commands

[edit on 31-8-2006 by WestPoint23]

Taking into consideration the very unstable region of the wrold, I hope that our soldiers do not become targets of muslin radicals that the article said are growing in Africa.

There aren't going to BE any soldiers there. This is NOT a deployment of soldiers. This is simply a command. It's consolidating all three commands that get information about Africa into one. It's a way of keeping the information together, and to make sure nothing is missed because the unit that needed it went to the wrong command to get it. That's all this is. Not actual bases and troop deployments to Africa.

Originally posted by Zaphod58
There aren't going to BE any soldiers there.

Well that is better I guess.

so really it all comes down to what works logistically on paper...although I'm sure the US wish they had more influence down there, there are quite vast amounts of natural resources eg. oil.

Creating an Africa command makes a lot of sense given that the region is very unstable and then that Africa will be the next battle ground in the War on Terror . This is one of the few good ideas to emerge from Washington in recent years.