The Senate’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act empowers the Pentagon to establish a strategic competition initiative for the U.S. Africa Command. If the bill passes, this will be the first security initiative expressly authorized by Congress since the Cold War to funnel military aid to African forces to counter Beijing and Moscow. The proposal lays new legal groundwork for a long-term bid to expand U.S. military influence in Africa. But the security initiative it authorizes will likely be dogged by U.S. military and diplomatic negligence and sow instability in Africa and U.S.-Africa relations. It should be cut from the bill before the 2022 NDAA is signed into law.
The proposed initiative aims to fight “coercion by near-peer rivals” against African governments by strengthening their militaries and addressing myriad “sources of insecurity” across the continent. If it’s established, high bipartisan consensus around both U.S. Africa policy and the threat posed by China and Russia suggest that its scope and funding are poised to grow quickly. This proposal warrants more public scrutiny than it has received, particularly given that the United States charted a similar course during the Cold War and African reformers are still facing the aftermath. A long history suggests that the proposed military aid for Africa will escape congressional oversight while the Pentagon and State Department will do little to monitor and account for its consequences.
Near the Cold War’s conclusion, while the Reagan State Department publicly deemed U.S. military aid to Africa “measured and moderate,” a classified Pentagon memo labeled key aid programs “a tragic joke,” “not demonstrably necessary and not sustainable,” based in “intuition and popular wisdom,” with “no success stories to date and none on the horizon.” There has been progress since then but much of that memo could have been written yesterday. U.S. training for coup leaders in Mali and Guinea, funding for rampaging battalions in DRC and Cameroon, and military aid to repressive governments in Uganda and Niger tell much the same story. It’s one that reflects not only a U.S. impulse to prioritize counterterrorism over peace and democracy in Africa, but also inept monitoring and assessment of U.S. “train and equip” programs for African armed forces.
The Pentagon, for example, rarely fails to tout its human rights training for African militaries. But the Government Accountability Office recently deemed its assessments of the scope and quality of this instruction unreliable. The Pentagon has no protocol in place to assess the impact of its human rights training on the “behavior, practices, or policies” of African militaries. It simply doesn’t know, and it doesn’t have a good means of finding out.
According to a Pentagon Inspector General report released through FOIA, the U.S. Africa Command also has a “personnel accountability” problem and is often unable to track the whereabouts and status of the numerous military contractors it employs throughout the continent.
State Department surveysofU.S. defense articles and services licensed for commercial export to Africa often indicate good chances of them falling into the wrong hands. Surveys during the Trump administration revealed record highs in the percentage of these exports deemed “unfavorable,” primarily because they were delivered to “unlicensed” or “unreliable” foreign parties.
Likewise, the State Department often had little idea where military equipment donated through its flagship Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership ended up. Rather than conducting site visits or relying on satellite technology to keep track of the armored vehicles and other equipment it donated to states like Cameroon and Niger, the agency often trusted social media to determine if it was being misused. Earlier this year, the House passed a reform bill for this floundering security partnership. The bill was rightly opposed by a handful of Africa experts and progressive House members because it would’ve also formally authorized the initiative. Its key reforms were written into the House's 2022 NDAA, but they aren’t in the Senate version, and they are sorely needed.
The 2017 NDAA passed even broader reforms to improve monitoring and assessment of U.S. security cooperation programs. Two years later, the Senate Armed Services Committee deemed the Pentagon’s progress toward this goal “wholly inadequate.” Nonetheless, this year the Biden administration requested budget cuts for these activities, from a paltry $8.9 million to $7 million out of a security cooperation budget of more than $6.5 billion.
This void of oversight should be kept in mind when assessing the failures of U.S. security policy in Africa. It should be scrutinized before U.S. soldiers are killed during security cooperation missions in Africa and U.S.-trained troops commit human rights violations and overthrow governments. The Senate’s new security initiative will inherit this legacy of negligence. It's more than enough reason to discard the proposal before the 2022 NDAA reaches President Biden’s desk.
Sobukwe Odinga is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in Political Science, and his research examines African security politics and the role of race in US foreign policy.
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DJIBOUTI (May 12, 2010) Marine Cpl. Robert Wood, assigned to the armory of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), instructs Ethiopian Lt. Col. Sultan Ebu, a coalition officer for strategic communications at CJTF-HOA, on the proper procedures for firing an M-16 service rifle before a U.S. Marine Corps Enhanced Marksmanship range evolution at the Djibouti City Police Department gun range. Nearly 20 military members deployed to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti participated in the exercise, which focuses on advanced tactical weapons training. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Marc Rockwell-Pate/Released)
Top Image Credit: Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets after Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, October 1, 2024 REUTERS/Amir Cohen TPX
As the Trump administrationproceeds full speed ahead on its Golden Dome missile defense project, U.S. officials and engineering experts alike suggest it's a next to impossible undertaking.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, Space Force vice chief, likened Golden Dome to the WWII-era Manhattan project, which created the atom bomb. Acting DoD official Steven J. Morani called it a “monster systems engineering problem.” Trump himself compared it to President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” a space-based defense system that never made it past the drawing board.
Previously called “Iron Dome for America,” the Pentagon describes Golden Dome as a missile defense system similar to Israel’s “Iron Dome," which intercepts incoming projectiles with missiles, scaled up to protect the entirety of the United States from aerial threats. The project was made official with a January 27 executive order.
Advocates emphasize Golden Dome’s significance — describing it as critical for the defense of the U.S. amid increasingly perilous geopolitical conditions. But the project’s questionable feasibility — and likely exorbitant price tag — leaves observers skeptical that the project amounts to little more than a contract generator, all while harming prospects for peace.
The weapons industry goes to bat for Golden Dome
For its part, the U.S. has put nearly $3 billion toward Israel’s Iron Dome’s production, equipment, and maintenance since 2011. Understanding that the American version won’t likely operate quite the same way due to our continent’s sheer size, the Defense Department has requested industry input.
Contractors have sent the Pentagon over 360 company concept papers for consideration. They’re also publicly gunning for a role — weapons industry mainstay Lockheed Martin, for example, has published a web page and even a teaser trailer boasting of its capacities.
“We’re a major partner in Israel’s Iron Dome today,” RTX (formerly Raytheon) Chief Executive Chris Calio likewise pointed out in late January, upon Trump’s executive order for Golden Dome. “It's the bedrock of Raytheon…we view [America’s Golden Dome project] as a significant opportunity for us, something right in our wheelhouse.”
Execs from defense tech startup L3Harris, likewise, expressed their ability and eagerness to assist in an op-ed for Breaking Defense. “With a portfolio of proven capabilities in countering air and missile threats, we’re ready to assist [Trump’s] administration in achieving this goal,” Ken Bedingfield and Ed Zoiss wrote. The Pentagon is also reviewing a proposal for a similar defense system sporting tech from Anduril, Palantir, and SpaceX.
And counter-drone systems producer BlueHalo’s CEO, Jonathan Moneymaker, even pushed for scope creep in an interview with Business Insider, suggesting that — by bringing on state-of-the-art defense and AI-backed tech — the Golden Dome project could become a more holistic threat response system, rather than one more narrowly focused on projectiles. Naturally, the move would require "the full might of the Defense Industrial Base."
But the industry’s Golden Dome fervor should, considering its track record, be taken with a grain of salt.
“It is interesting to see how quickly defense contractors have allied themselves with President Trump’s call for a Golden Dome missile shield,” Project on Government Oversight national-security analyst and Bunker columnist Mark Thompson told RS. “Contractors’ statements about how well they can build a missile shield would carry more weight if they reflected the reality of the weapons they are currently producing.”
Thompson added, “While Lockheed talks about the need for such a Golden Dome, its F-35 fighter currently is ready for action only about 50% of the time.”
Is Golden Dome even possible?
Other feasibility issues chip away at Golden Dome’s viability. For example, Israel’s Iron Dome can intercept shorter-range projectiles deployed by regional neighbors. But if the U.S. were to be hit, it may well be targeted with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) — something Iron Dome can’t currently counter.
“The system [Golden Dome] borrows part of its name from — Israel's Iron Dome system — is only designed to defend against short to medium-range missiles. It would be of no use against an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile,” said William Hartung, a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
While the Pentagon can try to develop a system prepared for ICBMs, previous attempts haven’t been successful. “Long-range interceptors have failed many tests, and those tests were considerably less rigorous than an actual attack would be…that a new initiative would do better is both unproven and unlikely,” Hartung explained.
To defense contractors, this ICBM problem simply presents itself as another challenge, where they say some of Golden Dome’s work, complete with space-based lasers and radars, could take place beyond the atmosphere. "If [long-range] weapons maneuver around [our current defense] systems, that means our current architecture can't provide fire control ordnance,” L3Harris’ Zoiss told Fox News. “And, therefore, it has to be moved to space.”
In contrast, Pentagon insiders don’t even seem to know how Golden Dome would work in practice. “Right now, Golden Dome is, it’s really an idea,” a source familiar with internal discussions surrounding the project told CNN, emphasizing the project’s conceptual nature.
Meanwhile, the likelihood of long-range attacks Golden Dome would theoretically protect against is questionable. “It is not in the interests of either China or Russia to launch kinetic strikes to damage the U.S. homeland early in a crisis as this would likely draw the United States deeper into a conflict,” Xiaodon Liang, senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association, wrote.
What is clear is the project’s likely-hefty price tag, even as the DoD moves (at least nominally) to cut costs. Former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim supposed that Golden Dome could cost $100 billion per year through 2030. Going further, Ret. Air Force Lt. General Richard Newton told NewsNation that the Golden Dome system could cost $2.5 trillion.
“I’m not opposed to the idea of having a system like [Golden Dome] but it’s not just, the idea pops into one guy’s head and we should just suddenly spend hundreds of billions of dollars on it,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) mused at a March 13 Punchbowl News event on space policy.
And experts fear that Golden Dome will inflame already existing geopolitical tensions, or even encourage an arms race — where nuclear warheads, which can be attached to ICBMs — could be involved.
“Even if the United States were to sink hundreds of billions, or even trillions…into an exquisite new national missile defense program, how much return would we get on such a program if it would only encourage adversaries to build more cheap missiles?” Geoff Wilson, Distinguished Fellow and Strategic Advisor for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, asked of the project. “Such actions would do little to further American security and likely would only waste taxpayer dollars on an impossible Oval Office talking point while further inflaming a new global nuclear arms race that is putting every man, woman and child in this nation and around the globe at risk.”
“The only reliable defense against nuclear-armed missiles is to reduce the chances that they will be launched in the first place, which calls for a revival of arms control talks between the U.S. and Russia, and a dialogue on future nuclear developments with China,” Hartung said.
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Top photo: U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie (Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)
In an interview this morning with RS, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said there was clearly "no urgency" for U.S. military airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, now in their 13th day. Therefore, the administration should have gone to Congress for authorization and without it, those strikes are illegal.
Massie pointed to Vice President J.D. Vance's contribution to the now infamous signal chat which described the strikes as they were happening. "JD" as identified in the chat, which has been authenticated by the administration, among other points, said that "there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
"(Vance's) contribution there was to prove that there was no urgency, and that there were no U.S. troops that were in imminent danger, that needed to be defended. Which is the instance in which you might allow the president to engage in hostilities — if it was in self-defense and urgent, and before they had time to come to Congress," Massie told RS. " But they obviously, based on that signal chat, had time to come to Congress, but they chose not to."
Massie said there may be some effort in the House to push for a War Powers Act vote or for defunding the U.S. military operations in Yemen. He's tried before, but there are hurdles: the rules committee, of which he is no longer a member, could prevent a War Powers Vote from getting to the floor, for instance. "There may be opportunities to offer amendments in the appropriations process to defund the activity as well. We've done that in the past," he said.
So far there have been no movements in Congress as all of the attention has been on the titillating details of the chat, and the fact that a conversation about bombing targets in realtime in Yemen was taking place on an unsecured app with a then-undisclosed journalist from a unsympathetic magazine (an understatement) lingering in the background, screenshotting every minute.
"Yeah, a lot of people have missed the point of the leaked signal chat. I think people are going to debate, and are debating, was that the right forum? Should they been engaged in that channel? Was it reckless? Because they included a reporter, etcetera, etcetera, but they should be looking at what was said," Massie explained. "And one thing that was said is that there's no urgency here, okay? Well, that turns off their authority if they acknowledge there's no urgency."
In reporting last week it was clear that the Houthis, who had been standing down attacks since the phase 1 of Israel-Hamas ceasefire was brokered in January, had not launched attacks against U.S. ships in the Red Sea since before Trump's inauguration. They had only begun after the ceasefire was broken and in response to the first U.S. airstrikes on Yemen on March 15.
Secondly, is the question of the American interest in the shipping interruptions caused by the Houthis, also questioned by Vance in the chat, and others, like Jennifer Kavanagh in RS last week.
"I'm starting to like this guy he said, chuckling, saying the two are already on the same page on a number of foreign policy issues, "but the point that he made ... this is mostly goods that are going from Asia to Europe and, oh, by the way, is Egypt going to pay anything for this? Because they're the ones who make billions of dollars every year off of their canal. That was in that signal chat too."
"As soon as this attack happened, I tried to make a pragmatic economic argument against it. You know, an America First argument that this is predominantly not our shipping lane. It's like 3% of the stuff going through there goes to America. Why are we subsidizing Europe and Asia in an America First Presidency?"
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said the strikes have been "stunningly devastating" and the Wall Street Journal said Thursday they are “restoring deterrence.” But are they? The U.S. has been going after the Houthis and bombing Yemen on and off for over a year but their will and military capability, so far, appear un-thwarted.
"Long term, our meddling in the Middle East makes more enemies for us, whether it's, you know, supplying all the bombs that are being dropped on Gaza, or whether it's being in Afghanistan for over two decades, we're creating new enemies that we don't need to have," Massie said. "And so if there is some element of deterrence, you have to balance it against the motivation that you're generating for another 9/11."
Asked if the U.S. should pursue a political solution rather than a military one in the Middle East, Massie said the latter is clearly not working.
"I don't think the way they're waging this war in Gaza is the best thing for Israel."
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Matching the U.S. military to U.S. goals
The U.S. has long engaged in Pentagon prestidigitation. That’s where it proactively pledges to commit its blood and treasure around the world, until it realizes there ain’t enough to go around (cf., the U.S. military couldn’t fight two relatively rinky-dink wars in Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously). Short of doubling the U.S. defense budget to something like $2 trillion a year —“not gonna do it,” as President George H. W. Bush reportedly said — there’s only one other option: pick the nation’s fights, and where to fight, more judiciously.
This is a national conversation that is long overdue. That was made clear March 18, when NBC’s Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold reported that the Trump administration might let NATO’s top general be someone other than a U.S. military officer for the first time. President Donald Trump is, to put it mildly, no fan of history’s greatest military alliance.
NATO backers were not pleased with this heavily armored trial balloon. “It would be a political mistake of epic proportion, and once we give it up, they are not going to give it back,” retired Admiral James Stavridis, who served as NATO’s top officer from 2009 to 2013, said. “We would lose an enormous amount of influence within NATO, and this would be seen, correctly, as probably the first step toward leaving the Alliance altogether.”
But Trump has succeeded in pushing NATO members to spend more to defend against a revanchist Russia. This is a burden they should be willing to bear, 80 years after the U.S. saved their bacon in World War II. If such pressure continues, east Asian nations could increasingly follow suit to counter China’s expansionist aims.
This is where the tank tread, so to speak, meets the road: If the U.S. counts on other nations to pick up the slack far from home, it will lose leverage when it comes to calling the shots, military or otherwise, far from home.
Ronald O’Rourke, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service, regularly updates his primer(PDF) on “Geography, Strategy, and U.S. Force Design.” In it, he concludes that the size and shape of the U.S. military “for the past several decades” has been driven by Washington’s “goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia.” But, in his most recent update, he adds a key coda:
A change in U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. role in the world, and U.S. grand strategy toward one that accepts or supports the emergence of a spheres-of-influence world with spheres led by countries such as Russia, China, and the United States (whose sphere would likely be centered on the Western Hemisphere) could lead to a change in the U.S. force-planning standard, the size and composition of U.S. military forces, and U.S. defense plans, programs, and budgets.
Apparently, the only thing we have to sphere is sphere itself.
Dogfight
Trump’s disdain for NATO allies could bite the U.S. arms biz’s bottom line. Turns out some of those allies are in the market for new jet fighters, and the Pentagon’s F-35 fighter is looking less desirable in light of the White House’s barely concealed contempt for its potential buyers.
Britain, Canada, Germany, and Portugal are all candidates to scale back, or not even buy, F-35s since Trump declared he might hesitate to defend or even seek to annex NATO allies. The French-built Rafale and Swedish-built Gripen fighters, among others, are far cheaper, good-enough, options. “There’s going to be long-term negative consequences to the U.S. arms-export prospects to Europe and other allies,” veteran aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia predicted. “The F-35 was the product of an era of extreme trust, and they may never trust the U.S. again.”
“The United States priorities, once closely aligned with our own, are beginning to shift,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said March 18 as he announced Canada was buying a $4.2 billion Australian radar system. The day before, he had discussed the deal with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was pleased at the outcome. “Obviously,” Albanese said, “there are issues taking place, particularly between Canada and the United States, I wouldn’t have expected to have been happening in my lifetime.” Canada has already paid for 16 yet-to-be-delivered F-35s of a planned 88-plane buy worth $19 billion, but the balance could be up for grabs.
Trump may be a savvy pol, but someone in his orbit needs to remind him of Newton’s Third Law: for every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction.
Arms sales aren’t the only thing at stake
U.S. allies pushing for their own nuclear arsenals have largely been sidelined for two generations because those nations counted on staying dry (from atomic fallout) under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But Trump’s “America First” agenda, and his willingness to dismiss the need for alliances where the U.S. once provided superpower protection, are giving rise to second thoughts. France — the lone NATO member with nuclear weapons not dependent on U.S. technology — has suggested its neighbors share its own A-bomb bumbershoot.
The U.S. has fought to restrict access to the nine nations known to be in the nuclear club, primarily via good-government options like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But such efforts are no guarantee. Most infamously, Russia joined with the U.S. and Britain in 1994 in convincing Ukraine to give up the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons on its soil in exchange for Moscow’s pledge to respect its neighbor’s borders. Once stripped of such weapons, there was little Ukraine could do to thwart Russia’s attack on Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion three years ago.
“The Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine and Russia has significantly undercut allied confidence in the United States, including on extended [nuclear] deterrence,” Eric Brewer, who pushed nonproliferation efforts at the White House during Trump’s first term, said. “Not only is [Trump] pivoting away from allies but he’s seemingly pivoting toward Russia.”
Doug Edelman and his wife allegedly failed to pay $129 million in taxes from their Pentagon contracts supporting the Afghan war, the Wall Street Journal’s Margot Patrick reported March 18.
Sharing war plans via an unclassified mobile app — as the Trump administration’s high command just did — is something expressly barred by this 2023 Pentagon directive that apparently no one read.
But despite that, thanks for reading The Bunker this week. Consider sending to allies so they can subscribe here.
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