And it was impressive, that empire of bases, once you took it
in. It represented a garrisoning of the globe unprecedented in
the history of empires. That we Americans didn’t generally know
much about it was, in a sense, a matter of choice, a matter, you
might say, of self-blinding behavior. To hazard a guess: as a
people, we were uncomfortable enough with the idea of ourselves
as a global imperial power that we preferred not to know what
“we” were doing, or at least not to acknowledge what we had
become, even though every year hundreds of thousands of
Americans, military personnel and civilians alike, lived on,
worked on, or cycled through those bases. In this context, it
was startling how seldom they were part of our everyday news
cycle. For those in other countries, they often loomed
large indeed as the local face of the United States, but
you’d never know that if your source of news was the mainstream
media here.
That, of course, hasn’t changed. What has changed is
Washington’s attitude toward the public record. Its latest
basing moves are taking place enveloped in a blanket of secrecy,
which means that even if you want to know, it’s increasingly
tough to find out. Washington’s latest garrisoning strategy is
based on a new premise: a “small footprint,” meaning a tiny-bases,
rapid-deployment, special-ops and drone-heavy way of war that’s
being put into place across Africa in the twenty-first century,
as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse lays out today. While the
U.S. has always pursued parts of its imperial strategy in "the
shadows," to use a phrase from my Cold War childhood, in this
new strategy everyday basing, too, is disappearing into those
shadows, which is why Turse’s latest piece on the subject is a
small reportorial triumph of time and effort.
For this site in these last years, Turse has regularly revealed
much that has been out of sight when it comes to Washington’s
expanding military focus on Africa, including the cascading number of U.S. military missions
across that continent, a similar spike in missions to train proxy forces there, and soaring deployments of U.S. Special
Operations forces -- that secret military-within-the-military of
70,000 that now thrives solely in a world
of shadows. It took a year of his efforts, but today he
finishes off his portrait of the garrisoning of a whole
continent in a new way with a look at the basing policies of
U.S. Africa Command. It’s a piece that couldn’t be more
important or hard-won, and it offers us our first look at how a
continent is being prepared for what Turse, in his latest book,
has called “tomorrow’s battlefield.” Tom
So how many U.S. military bases are there in Africa? It’s a
simple question with a simple answer. For years, U.S. Africa
Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in
the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only
acknowledged “base” on the continent. It wasn’t true, of
course, because there were camps, compounds, installations,
and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on
semantics.
Take a look at the Pentagon’s official list of bases,
however, and the number grows. The 2015 report on the
Department of Defense’s global property portfolio lists Camp
Lemonnier and three other deep-rooted sites on or near the
continent: U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3,
a medical research facility in Cairo, Egypt, that was
established in 1946; Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, a
spacecraft tracking station and airfield located 1,000 miles
off the coast of West Africa that has been used by the U.S.
since 1957; and warehouses at the airport and seaport in
Mombasa, Kenya, that were built in the 1980s.
That’s only the beginning, not the end of the matter. For
years, various reporters have shed light on hush-hush outposts -- most of them built,
upgraded, or expanded since 9/11 -- dotting the continent,
including so-called cooperative security locations (CSLs).
Earlier this year, AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez disclosed that there were actually 11
such sites. Again, devoted AFRICOM-watchers knew that this,
too, was just the start of a larger story, but when I asked
Africa Command for a list of bases, camps and other sites, as
I periodically have done, I was treated like a sap.
“In all, AFRICOM has access to 11 CSLs across Africa. Of
course, we have one major military facility on the continent:
Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,” Anthony Falvo, AFRICOM’s Public
Affairs chief, told me. Falvo was peddling numbers that both
he and I know perfectly well are, at best, misleading. “It’s
one of the most troubling aspects of our military policy in
Africa, and overseas generally, that the military can’t be,
and seems totally resistant to being, honest and transparent
about what it’s doing,” says David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S.
Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.
Research by TomDispatch indicates that in recent
years the U.S. military has, in fact, developed a remarkably
extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points
in Africa. Some are currently being utilized, some are held
in reserve, and some may be shuttered. These bases, camps,
compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can
be found in at least 34 countries -- more than 60% of the
nations on the continent -- many of them corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records. The U.S. also
operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché
Offices in approximately 38 [African] nations,” according to
Falvo, and has struck close to 30 agreements to use
international airports in Africa as refueling centers.
There is no reason to believe that even this represents a
complete accounting of America’s growing archipelago of
African outposts. Although it’s possible that a few sites are
being counted twice due to AFRICOM’s failure to provide basic
information or clarification, the list TomDispatch
has developed indicates that the U.S. military has created a
network of bases that goes far beyond what AFRICOM has
disclosed to the American public, let alone to Africans.
Click here to see a larger version
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U.S. military outposts, port facilities, and other areas
of access in Africa, 2002-2015 (Nick Turse/TomDispatch,
2015)
AFRICOM’s Base Bonanza
When AFRICOM became an independent command in 2008, Camp
Lemonnier was reportedly still one of the few American
outposts on the continent. In the years since, the U.S. has
embarked on nothing short of a building boom -- even if the
command is loath to refer to it in those terms. As a result,
it’s now able to carry out increasing numbers of overt and
covert missions, from training exercises to drone
assassinations.
“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a
different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing
forces,” says Richard Reeve, the director of the Sustainable
Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a London-based
think tank. “Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant
stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft. There are
a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases... so
you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very
large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when
necessary.”
Indeed, U.S. staging areas, cooperative security locations,
forward operating locations (FOLs), and other outposts -- many
of them involved in intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance activities and Special Operations missions --
have been built (or built up) in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda. A 2011 report by Lauren Ploch,
an analyst in African affairs with the Congressional Research
Service, also mentioned U.S. military access to locations in
Algeria, Botswana, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe,
Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Zambia. AFRICOM failed to respond
to scores of requests by this reporter for further information
about its outposts and related matters, but an analysis of
open source information, documents obtained through the
Freedom of Information Act, and other records show a
persistent, enduring, and growing U.S. presence on the
continent.
“A cooperative security location is just a small location
where we can come in... It would be what you would call a very
austere location with a couple of warehouses that has things
like: tents, water, and things like that,” explained AFRICOM’s
Rodriguez. As he implies, the military doesn’t consider CSLs
to be “bases,” but whatever they might be called, they are
more than merely a few tents and cases of bottled water.
Designed to accommodate about 200 personnel, with runways
suitable for C-130 transport aircraft, the sites are primed
for conversion from temporary, bare-bones facilities into
something more enduring. At least three of them in Senegal,
Ghana, and Gabon are apparently designed to facilitate faster
deployment for a rapid reaction unit with a mouthful of a
moniker: Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis
Response-Africa (SPMAGTF-CR-AF). Its forces are based in Morón, Spain, and Sigonella, Italy, but
are focused on Africa. They rely heavily on MV-22 Ospreys, tilt-rotor aircraft that can take-off,
land, and hover like helicopters, but fly with the speed and
fuel efficiency of a turboprop plane.
This combination of manpower, access, and technology has come
to be known in the military by the moniker “New Normal.” Birthed in the wake of the September
2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador J.
Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the New Normal
effectively allows the U.S. military quick access 400 miles
inland from any CSL or, as Richard Reeve notes, gives it “a
reach that extends to just about every country in West and
Central Africa.”
![]()
The concept was field-tested as South Sudan plunged into
civil war and 160 Marines and sailors from Morón
were forward deployed to Djibouti in late 2013. Within
hours, a contingent from that force was sent to Uganda and, in
early 2014, in conjunction with another rapid reaction unit,
dispatched to South Sudan to evacuate 20 people from the
American embassy in Juba. Earlier this year, SPMAGTF-CR-AF
ran trials at its African staging areas including the CSL in
Libreville, Gabon, deploying nearly 200 Marines and sailors
along with four Ospreys, two C-130s, and more than 150,000
pounds of materiel.
A similar test run was carried out at the Senegal CSL located
at Dakar-Ouakam Air Base, which can also host 200 Marines and
the support personnel necessary to sustain and transport
them. “What the CSL offers is the ability to forward-stage
our forces to respond to any type of crisis,” Lorenzo Armijo,
an operations officer with SPMAGTF-CR-AF, told a military
reporter. “That crisis can range in the scope of military
operations from embassy reinforcement to providing
humanitarian assistance.”
Another CSL, mentioned in a July 2012 briefing by U.S. Army
Africa, is located in Entebbe, Uganda. From there, according
to a Washington Post investigation, U.S. contractors
have flown surveillance missions using innocuous-looking
turboprop airplanes. “The AFRICOM strategy is to have a very
light touch, a light footprint, but nevertheless facilitate
special forces operations or ISR [intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance] detachments over a very wide area,” Reeve
says. “To do that they don’t need very much basing
infrastructure, they need an agreement to use a location,
basic facilities on the ground, a stockpile of fuel, but they
also can rely on private contractors to maintain a number of
facilities so there aren’t U.S. troops on the ground.”
Click here to see a larger version
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U.S. Army Africa briefing slide from 2012 detailing work
at the Entebbe CSL
The Outpost Archipelago
AFRICOM ignored my requests for further information on CSLs
and for the designations of other outposts on the continent,
but according to a 2014 article in Army
Sustainment on “Overcoming Logistics Challenges in East
Africa,” there are also “at least nine forward operating
locations, or FOLs.” A 2007 Defense Department news release
referred to an FOL in Charichcho, Ethiopia. The U.S. military
also utilizes “Forward Operating Location Kasenyi” in Kampala,
Uganda. A 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office
mentioned forward operating locations in Isiolo
and Manda Bay, both in Kenya.
Camp Simba in Manda Bay has, in fact, seen significant
expansion in recent years. In 2013, Navy Seabees, for
example, worked 24-hour shifts to extend its
runway to enable larger aircraft like C-130s to land there,
while other projects were initiated to accommodate greater
numbers of troops in the future, including increased fuel and
potable water storage, and more latrines. The base serves as
a home away from home for Navy personnel and Army Green Berets
among other U.S. troops and, as recently revealed at the Intercept,
plays an integral role in the secret drone assassination program aimed at
militants in neighboring Somalia as well as in Yemen.
Drones have played an increasingly large role in this
post-9/11 build-up in Africa. MQ-1 Predators have, for
instance, been based in Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, while their newer, larger,
more far-ranging cousins, MQ-9 Reapers, have been flown out of Seychelles International
Airport. As of June 2012, according to the Intercept, two
contractor-operated drones, one Predator and one Reaper, were
based in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, while a detachment
with one Scan Eagle (a low-cost drone used by the
Navy) and a remotely piloted helicopter known as an MQ-8 Fire Scout operated off the coast
of East Africa. The U.S. also recently began setting up a base in Cameroon for unarmed Predators
to be used in the battle against Boko Haram militants.
Click here to see a larger version
![]()
U.S. Army Africa briefing slide from 2013 obtained by TomDispatch
via the Freedom of Information Act
In February 2013, the U.S. also began flying Predator drones out of Niger’s
capital, Niamey. A year later, Captain Rick
Cook, then chief of U.S. Africa Command’s Engineer Division, mentioned the potential for a new
“base-like facility” that would be “semi-permanent” and
“capable of air operations” in that country. That September,
the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock exposed plans to base drones at a second
location there, Agadez. Within days, the U.S. Embassy in
Niamey announced that AFRICOM was, indeed,
“assessing the possibility of establishing a temporary,
expeditionary contingency support location in Agadez, Niger.”
Earlier this year, Captain Rodney Worden of AFRICOM’s
Logistics and Support Division mentioned “a partnering and
capacity-building project... for the Niger Air Force and Armed
Forces in concert with USAFRICOM and [U.S.] Air Forces Africa
to construct a runway and associated work/life support area
for airfield operations.” And when the National Defense
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 was introduced in April, embedded in it was
a $50 million request for the construction of an
“airfield and base camp at Agadez, Niger... to support
operations in western Africa.” When Congress recently passed
the annual defense policy bill, that sum was authorized.
According to Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, the head of
U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, there is also a team
of Special Operations forces currently “living right next to”
local troops in Diffa, Niger. A 2013 military briefing slide,
obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of
Information Act, indicates a “U.S. presence” as well in
Ouallam, Niger, and at both Bamako and Kidal in neighboring
Mali. Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, a country
that borders both of those nations, plays host to a Special
Operations Forces Liaison Element Team, a Joint Special
Operations Air Detachment, and the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off
and Landing Airlift Support initiative which, according to
official documents, facilitates “high-risk activities” carried
out by elite forces from Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Trans Sahara.
On the other side of the continent in Somalia, elite U.S.
forces are operating from small compounds in
Kismayo and Baledogle, according to reporting by Foreign
Policy. Neighboring Ethiopia has similarly been a
prime locale for American outposts, including Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, contingency operating
locations at both Hurso and Bilate, and facilities used by a
40-man team based in Bara. So-called Combined
Operations Fusion Centers were set up in the Democratic
Republic of Congo and South Sudan as part of an effort to
destroy Joseph Kony and his murderous Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA). Washington Post investigations have
revealed that U.S. forces have also been based in Djema, Sam Ouandja, and Obo, in the Central African Republic as
part of that effort. There has recently been new construction
by Navy Seabees at Obo to increase the camp’s capacity as well
as to install the infrastructure for a satellite dish.
There are other locations that, while not necessarily
outposts, nonetheless form critical nodes in the U.S. base
network on the continent. These include 10 marine gas and oil
bunkers located at ports in eight African nations.
Additionally, AFRICOM acknowledges an agreement to use
Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Senegal for
refueling as well as for the “transportation of teams
participating in security cooperation activities.” A similar
deal is in place for the use of Kitgum Airport in Kitgum,
Uganda, and Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in
Ethiopia. All told, according to the Defense Logistics
Agency, the U.S. military has struck 29 agreements to use
airports as refueling centers in 27 African countries.
Not all U.S. bases in Africa have seen continuous use in
these years. After the American-backed military overthrew the government of Mauritania
in 2008, for example, the U.S. suspended an airborne surveillance
program based in its capital, Nouakchott.
Following a coup in Mali by a U.S.-trained officer, the United
States suspended military relations with the government and a
spartan U.S. compound near the town of Gao was apparently overrun by rebel forces.
Most of the new outposts on that continent, however, seem to
be putting down roots. As TomDispatch regular and basing expert David Vine suggests, “The
danger of the strategy in which you see U.S. bases popping up
increasingly around the continent is that once bases get
established they become very difficult to close. Once they
generate momentum, within Congress and in terms of funding,
they have a tendency to expand.”
To supply its troops in East Africa, AFRICOM has also built a
sophisticated logistics system. It’s officially known as the
Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as the “new spice route.”
It connects Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. These hubs
are, in turn, part of a transportation and logistics network
that includes bases located in Rota, Spain; Aruba in the
Lesser Antilles; Souda Bay, Greece; and a forward operating site on Britain’s
Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.
Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, headquarters of U.S. Air
Forces Europe and one of the largest American military bases
outside the United States, is another key site. As the
Intercept reported earlier this year, it serves as
“the high-tech heart of America’s drone program” for the
Greater Middle East and Africa. Germany is also host to
AFRICOM’s headquarters, located at Kelley Barracks in
Stuttgart-Moehringen, itself a site reportedly integral to drone operations in Africa.
In addition to hosting a contingent of the Marines and
sailors of Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis
Response-Africa, Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Italy,
is another important logistics facility for African
operations. The second-busiest military air station in
Europe, Sigonella is a key hub for drones covering Africa,
serving as a base for MQ-1 Predators and RQ-4B Global Hawk surveillance drones.
The Crown Jewels
Back on the continent, the undisputed crown jewel in the U.S.
archipelago of bases is indeed still Camp Lemonnier. To quote Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter, it is “a hub with lots of spokes out there on the
continent and in the region.” Sharing a runway with
Djibouti's Ambouli International Airport, the
sprawling compound is the headquarters of Combined Joint Task
Force-Horn of Africa and is home to the East Africa Response Force,
another regional quick-reaction unit. The camp, which also
serves as the forward headquarters for Task Force 48-4, a hush-hush
counterterrorism unit targeting militants in East Africa and
Yemen, has seen personnel stationed there jump by more than
400% since 2002.
In the same period, Camp Lemonnier has expanded from 88 acres to nearly 600
acres and is in the midst of a years-long building boom for which more than $600
million has already been awarded or allocated. In
late 2013, for example, B.L. Harbert International, an
Alabama-based construction company, was awarded a $150 million contract by the
Navy for “the P-688 Forward Operating Base at Camp Lemonnier.”
According to a corporate press release, “the site is
approximately 20 acres in size, and will contain 11 primary
structures and ancillary facilities required to support
current and emerging operational missions throughout the
region.”
In 2014, the Navy completed construction of a $750,000
secure facility for Special Operations Command Forward-East
Africa (SOCFWD-EA). It is one of three similar teams on the
continent -- the others being SOCFWD-Central Africa and SOCFWD-North
and West Africa -- which, according to the military, “shape and
coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and
engagement in support of theater special operations command,
geographic combatant command, and country team goals and
objectives.”
In 2012, according to secret documents recently revealed by the Intercept, 10
Predator drones and four Reaper drones were based at Camp Lemonnier, along with six
U-28As (a single-engine aircraft that
conducts surveillance for special operations forces) and two P-3 Orions (a four-engine turboprop
surveillance aircraft). There were also eight F-15E Strike
Eagles, heavily armed, manned fighter jets. By August 2012, an
average of 16 drones and four fighters were taking off or landing at the base each
day.
The next year, in the wake of a number of drone crashes and
turmoil involving Djiboutian air traffic controllers, drone
operations were moved to a more remote site located about six
miles away. Djibouti’s Chabelley Airfield, which has seen
significant construction of late and has a much lower profile
than Camp Lemonnier, now serves as a key base for America’s
regional drone campaign. Dan Gettinger, the co-founder and
co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard
College, recently told the Intercept that the
operations run from the site were “JSOC [Joint Special
Operations Command] and CIA-led missions for the most part,”
explaining that they were likely focused on counterterrorism
strikes in Somalia and Yemen, intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance activities, as well as support for the
Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen.
A Scarier Future
Over many months, AFRICOM repeatedly ignored even basic
questions from this reporter about America’s sweeping
archipelago of bases. In practical terms, that means there is
no way to know with complete certainty how many of the more
than 60 bases, bunkers, outposts, and areas of access are
currently being used by U.S. forces or how many additional
sites may exist. What does seem clear is that the number of
bases and other sites, however defined, is increasing,
mirroring the rise in the number of U.S. troops, special operations deployments, and missions in Africa.
“There’s going to be a network of small bases with maybe a
couple of medium-altitude, long-endurance drones at each one,
so that anywhere on the continent is always within range,”
says the Oxford Research Group's Richard Reeve when I ask him
for a forecast of the future. In many ways, he notes, this
has already begun everywhere but in southern Africa, not
currently seen by the U.S. military as a high-risk area.
The Obama administration, Reeve explains, has made use of
humanitarian rhetoric as a cover for expansion on the
continent. He points in particular to the deployment of forces
against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, the
build-up of forces near Lake Chad in the effort against Boko
Haram, and the post-Benghazi New Normal concept as examples. “But,
in practice, what is all of this going to be used for?” he
wonders. After all, the enhanced infrastructure and increased
capabilities that today may be viewed by the White House as an
insurance policy against another Benghazi can easily be
repurposed in the future for different types of military
interventions.
“Where does this go post-Obama?” Reeve asks rhetorically,
noting that the rise of AFRICOM and the proliferation of small
outposts have been “in line with the Obama doctrine.” He
draws attention to the president’s embrace of a
lighter-footprint brand of warfare, specifically a reliance on
Special Operations forces and drones. This may, Reeve adds,
just be a prelude to something larger and potentially more
dangerous.
“Where would Hillary take this?” he asks, referencing the hawkish Democratic primary frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. “Or any
of the Republican potentials?” He points to the George W.
Bush administration as an example and raises the question of
what it might have done back in the early 2000s if AFRICOM’s
infrastructure had already been in place. Such a thought
experiment, he suggests, could offer clues to what the future
might hold now that the continent is dotted with American
outposts, drone bases, and compounds for elite teams of
Special Operations forces. “I think,” Reeve says, “that we
could be looking at something a bit scarier in Africa.”
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch
and a fellow at the Nation Institute. A 2014
Izzy Award and American Book Award winner
for his book Kill Anything That Moves, his pieces
have appeared in the New York Times, the Intercept, the Los Angeles
Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book is Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa.
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