Roguely Stated

“A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost.”

In this month’s Esquire magazine, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes about the U.S. military’s new Africa Command and their initial operations. Barnett sheds light on AfriCom as the Pentagon’s new experiment in fighting what Gen. Abizaid, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, refers to as radical Islam. The new paradigm is one that has the military working under and through the U.S. State Department and on certain U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) missions.

This new approach focuses on using all of the aspects national power – Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economics, known by the acronym DIME – to combat terrorists and foreign fighters in the region, which, as Barnett notes, has been so clearly lacking in America’s recent postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

MORE:

Map: Africa Command: Inside the Mission

Tom Barnett’s Photo Album with CJTF-HOA

C-SPAN interview on Africa Command