3000 U.S. Troops To Africa To Fight Ebola

Today at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), President Obama will announce he has ordered the Defense Department to deploy as many as 3,000 troops to West Africa as part of the fight against Ebola, according to the Associated Press. Most will be logistics and medical personnel joined by specialists from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the CDC itself.  The operation’s intent appears to be directed at shoring up the efforts of regional and international aid organizations, precisely the kind of humanitarian operation for which the armed forces are well-suited, given their comparative self-sufficiency in logistical terms and ability to mobilize rapidly.

United States Africa Command will almost certainly be the military lead. AFRICOM, which was activated in 2008, has had a checkered history. Its creation was viewed with alarm by activists and scholars interested in Sub-Saharan Africa, who feared American foreign policy towards the region was being militarized. In November 2012, AFRICOM’s Commander, Army General William “Kip” Ward, was demoted and retired after an investigation revealed abuse of his position and misuse of government funds. An October 2013 Defense Department Inspector General’s report criticized the command’s ability to carry out civil-military operations and called into question its financial accounting practices in the field.

Though AFRICOM has conducted a large number of humanitarian and training operations across Sub-Saharan Africa, and has coordinated counter-terrorism operations with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), neither the command nor the Defense Department has in the six years of its existence produced any satisfactory data that shows AFRICOM’s missions have led to an outcome greater than the sum of their parts. AFRICOM was created in large measure because Africa was a strategic after-thought during the Cold War — other than as a source of proxies for competing with the Soviet Union and China, American foreign policy gave little thought to Africa below the Sahara. For example, AFRICOM has no dedicated troops of its own. Other than small service headquarters in Stuttgart and Vicenza, Italy, to coordinate programming, it has to borrow troops from the individual services to carry out its mission.

As a result, of all the military commands AFRICOM has the least amount of political support on the Hill, and its cost-to-outcome ratio has made it a target for Congressional budget-cutters. NGOs in the US and Europe remain suspicious of its “true” purposes. Comparatively few military personnel view an AFRICOM assignment as a career-maker. In strategic terms, the command’s relationship with African leaders who lean autocratic, rather than democratic, could well lead to future foreign policy blowback, as some fear AFRICOM is training the next generation of African despots in the same way that the notorious School of the Americas trained so many of Latin America’s tyrants.

The Ebola task force is a “real-world” mission in every sense of the term. Pandemic disease specialists are concerned that, left unchecked, Ebola strains may quickly mutate into a form much more readily transmitted. Fighting Ebola, not terrorists, may turn out to be AFRICOM’s proof-of-concept. Given the stakes, we can only hope the organization is up to the job.

By: Russ Burgos

Interested in foreign affairs, global conflict, and political narratives and discourses