The Africa Partnership Station – Volume 14, Issue 6 – August 2008

A new US approach to sub-Saharan engagement

The United States has two key strategic interests in sub-Saharan Africa that potentially call for the application of military force: counter-terrorism and securing access to hydrocarbons. In February 2007, the Pentagon established a new regional combatant command known as Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Although AFRICOM's physical presence on the continent will be small and its military assets relatively light, its creation has fuelled rising fears of American hegemony and the 'militarisation' of the United States' relationship with Africa.

With only one country – Liberia – currently prepared to host an AFRICOM regional headquarters (see box, left), it is sensible that the US Navy, rather than the army, has assumed the lead role in the United States' strategic engagement with Africa. The navy's principal instrument in this regard is the Africa Partnership Station (APS), which completed its first six-month exercise in the Gulf of Guinea in April 2008.

The APS is part of the navy's Global Fleet Station (GFS) programme, whereby American ships establish a relatively light, mobile presence in various parts of the world and provide several types of assistance to local people and institutions. In South America, the GFS has focused on humanitarian work. The APS, whose inaugural deployment was led by the USS Fort McHenry and three other craft, builds on a broader strategic concept of maritime-sector development. The operational objective is to enhance maritime safety and security by improving African naval capabilities in maritime domain awareness, military professionalism, technical infrastructure and operational response. The strategic objective is to render African nations both self-sufficient in securing the maritime domain and favourably aligned with the United States, by virtue of the relationships cultivated.

Multilateral approach

The Navy stresses that APS 'is a concept, not a platform'. As such, it aims for synergies rather than patronage. For African nations, the incentives are there. Some 60% of the world's human trafficking occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. The 10% global increase in piracy in 2007 was largely attributable to attacks off African shores. Sub-Saharan Africa loses $1 billion a year to illegal fishing, and illegal oil bunkering in Nigeria alone siphons off $3 million a day from the legitimate economy. In addition to ameliorating these problems, increased local maritime capabilities would help prosecute global strategic agendas by countering drug-trafficking, arms proliferation and terrorism. The APS engages not only African nations but also ex-colonial European powers still influential in the region – mainly France, the United Kingdom and Portugal. Firstly, the US wants to exploit the European nations' extensive historical knowledge and cultural understanding of the region. Washington also wants to ensure that American and European regional activities and objectives are in reasonable harmony. Senior British, French, Portuguese and German officers were among the APS staff on the inaugural tour.

The larger hope is that the navy will build and enhance diplomatic and operational relationships on a multilateral as well as bilateral level. At present, regional bodies with nominal authority over maritime affairs – such as the Maritime Organisation of West and Central Africa – are essentially moribund. The APS, however, aims to energise more robust bodies – like the Economic Community of West African States – to establish effective multilateral elements through which American military-to-military activity would be both diplomatically and operationally easier to conduct and sustain. Such a development could lead to a wholesale replacement of the US 'anchor state' approach to African engagement, which has proven inadequate for serving the interests of smaller states.

 As long as armed intervention is unnecessary, it makes more sense for Washington to reach out to foreign governments and populations itinerantly, from ships, without politically burdening and psychologically intimidating them with a big ground presence. The idea is to foster positive US influence, free of the tension that having in-country US troops might produce. However, because the APS stays in the region, it is also a presence on which regional partners can rely. Its operational training courses aim to build strong and durable ties. Meanwhile, community-outreach schemes – such as repairing orphanages, building schoolhouses and clinics, delivering meals to feeding centres, taking medical supplies to hospitals or visiting schools, churches and mosques – are designed to improve the diplomatic environment and local goodwill.

An auspicious start

Joining the USS Fort McHenry, a 186-metre amphibious landing ship, on the APS's maiden voyage were the high-speed vessel Swift, a 98-metre catamaran; the USS Annapolis, a nuclear attack submarine; and the 173-metre USS San Jacinto, a guided-missile cruiser. These vessels visited 12 countries: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal and Togo. The APS also provided shipboard training for sailors from Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), The Gambia and Sierra Leone. For much of the tour, officers from several West and Central African countries were embarked on the Fort McHenry and served as APS staff members. Dozens of enlisted personnel from ten of those countries also spent substantial periods onboard each vessel.

In each country, the US Navy conducted compressed training programmes, sometimes in conjunction with the US Coast Guard, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or teams from the French and Spanish navies. Training included tactical tasks such as sentry duty or search-and-seizure, operational priorities such as port security, aspects of security-sector reform like maritime law and, finally, leadership. Detachments of P-3 Orion anti-submarine patrol aircraft were also deployed to Nigeria and Senegal for joint lost-at-sea exercises. In all, the navy offered courses in 15 subjects to more than 1,500 students drawn from the navies and coast guards of 15 countries. The effort yielded genuine operational dividends, particularly those stemming from the navy's insistence on the APS concept's interagency sweep. 

 The APS commander had a foreign-policy adviser assigned by the State Department. The navy also worked with the US Agency for International Development and non-governmental organisations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Among the activities undertaken were maritime-security training in small-boat operations, plus the maintenance and installation of Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders and radar for Gabonese and Congolese park rangers.

The first APS tour culminated in a day-long maritime-security symposium in Dakar, Senegal. The principal participants were the senior US Navy officers in charge of APS, the heads or deputy heads of nine West and Central Africa navies and coast guards, officers from European navies and ministerial representatives from regional governments.

In terms of substance and candour, the quality of the proceedings exceeded expectations, although African participants did ask for somewhat longer training courses and noted that getting civilian leaders to buy into a new emphasis on maritime, instead of just ground, security was difficult. The symposium also brought into greater focus the task of developing a multilateral maritime-security capacity, with the US proposal of a Regional Maritime Center of Excellence being warmly received. The symposium's most conspicuous absentee was Nigeria, the ranking regional power without whose acceptance the APS will never be an unmitigated success. But Nigeria did send a senior naval planner – albeit not one of flag rank – to the APS Concept Refinement Conference in Washington in mid May. So its eventual acceptance of the APS appears probable.

In any case, as the political and operational efficacy of the APS's first tour became clear, the navy consolidated plans for another six-month deployment and made the APS a continuously operating concept. It is adding to its roster of assets a Seabees detachment working on four projects in Liberia, and the US Coast Guard cutter Dallas. The latter is leading combined law-enforcement operations with Cape Verde, which is situated near major drug-trafficking lanes, during the summer and early autumn of 2008.

Mission compatibility

The navy has understood that a large American ground force could undermine key US interests in Africa. Because maritime initiatives like the APS are inherently less intrusive, the US Navy is employing them to negate such perceptions. At the same time, the US Department of Defense has begun to reconfigure the ground-force structure, by devoting more resources to small, agile special-operations units suitable for discreetly combating terrorists. The department is also dramatically expanding the remit of Special Operations Command.

The 2,000-strong Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) based in Djibouti exemplifies this new focus. As the primary military component of the US counter-terrorism mission Operation Enduring Freedom, the CJTF-HOA has forged impressive regional partnerships and an interagency approach to humanitarian assistance and military-to-military training programmes. But its involvement in the Ethiopian-led attack on Somali Islamists in late 2006 has also exacerbated wider African worries about covert American operations and neo-colonial heavy-handedness.

Therefore, although the CJTF-HOA will become an AFRICOM asset, the APS may well prove to be AFRICOM's most politically valuable tool. Despite discussions within the navy and among US agencies about extending the APS to East and Southern Africa, the consensus favours branding the APS as a West and Central African asset for the time being, to ensure that the momentum generated so far is not weakened by overstretch. Even so, the navy plans to continue close security engagement in Southern and East Africa, according to the same maritime-security development model. Eventually, as bilateral security cooperation in these other regions rises, and the navy and its APS partners move up the learning curve in the Gulf of Guinea, wider deployment of the APS may become more feasible.