The Pivot to Africa: Tomorrow's wars today!

[eridani]

Do you suppose that Russia and/or China will ever think they need a "North American Command"? I like that idea just about as much as Africans like Africom and Latin Americans like Southcom.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/282-98/19248-focus-the-pivot-to-africa

They're involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that's just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the U.S. military is at work. Base construction, security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network, all undeniable evidence of expansion - except at U.S. Africa Command.

To hear AFRICOM tell it, U.S. military involvement on the continent ranges from the miniscule to the microscopic. The command is adamant that it has only a single "military base" in all of Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. The head of the command insists that the U.S. military maintains a "small footprint" on the continent. AFRICOM's chief spokesman has consistently minimized the scope of its operations and the number of facilities it maintains or shares with host nations, asserting that only "a small presence of personnel who conduct short-duration engagements" are operating from "several locations" on the continent at any given time.

With the war in Iraq over and the conflict in Afghanistan winding down, the U.S. military is deploying its forces far beyond declared combat zones. In recent years, for example, Washington has very publicly proclaimed a "pivot to Asia," a "rebalancing" of its military resources eastward, without actually carrying out wholesale policy changes. Elsewhere, however, from the Middle East to South America, the Pentagon is increasingly engaged in shadowy operations whose details emerge piecemeal and are rarely examined in a comprehensive way. Nowhere is this truer than in Africa. To the media and the American people, officials insist the U.S. military is engaged in small-scale, innocuous operations there. Out of public earshot, officers running America's secret wars say: "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today."

[Democracyinkind]

1. McKinder's blind spot up for grabs.

As soon as we conquered the heartland. The empire is bipartisan.

[newfie11]

2. Our military command has gone off the deep end

What the hell do we need to spend money building or maintaining bases all over the world? Does any other county do this, Russia, China?
The missiles our military is always bragging about can hit anywhere and lord knows we have plenty of ships to carry them on.

Here at home we have people living in tents or cardboard boxes, can't find a job, no dentist or doctor, on and on.

This is INSANE!!!!

[RandiFan1290]

3. China won't need to spend their $$

They have US troops protecting their miners in Afghanistan right now.

[Supersedeas]

4. alternatively, it could be argued what the US should be more directly

and more openly involved