US considers pulling troops from West Africa

[Swordsmyth]

The Pentagon is looking into reducing or even withdrawing US troops from West Africa, part of a worldwide redeployment of military forces, the New York Times reported Tuesday.There are between 6,000 and 7,000 US troops in Africa, mainly in West Africa but also in places like Somalia.
The US presence includes military trainers as well as a recently built $110 million drone base in Niger, the Times said.
A withdrawal would also end US support for French military efforts in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso in their war along with local troops against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State group jihadists.

More at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-consid...154635503.html

[sparebulb]

Where's the fun of doing the wrong thing if you don't occasionally tease and threaten to do the right thing.

We aren't pulling out of anything.

[Swordsmyth]

Where's the fun of doing the wrong thing if you don't occasionally tease and threaten to do the right thing.

We aren't pulling out of anything.

We will pull out of lots of places.

[Zippyjuan]

We will pull out of lots of places.

I heard we will be leaving Syria soon. Thirty days, wasn't it? That was sometime last December.

[oyarde]

I heard we will be leaving Syria soon. Thirty days, wasn't it? That was sometime last December.

Seems like obama sent the US troops to west africa to fight ebola.

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.businessinsider.com/trum...lection-2019-1

Trump deploys 80 US troops to Gabon in case 'violent demonstrations' occur after contentious presidential election

President Donald Trump announced that 80 US troops were deployed to Libreville, Gabon, in Africa, to provide security for Americans and "diplomatic facilities" in Congo.

Trump said in a statement to congressional leaders that he deployed the troops on Wednesday in the event "violent demonstrations" happen after Congo held its presidential election on December 30.

Trump said the troops "will remain in the region until the security situation ... becomes such that their presence is no longer needed," and that he may deploy additional forces to Gabon "if necessary."

https://www.voanews.com/usa/trump-se...ps-middle-east

Trump to Send Additional Troops to Middle East

PENTAGON - The United States is sending additional troops to the Middle East to protect American forces from potential Iranian threats, President Donald Trump announced Friday.

"They're mostly in a protective capacity," he told reporters in response to a VOA question.

Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said the additions to the region would include "a Patriot battalion to defend against missile threats; additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft; an engineer element to provide force protection improvements throughout the region; and a fighter aircraft squadron to provide additional deterrence.

"The additional deployment to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility is a prudent defensive measure and intended to reduce the possibility of future hostilities," Shanahan added.

14,000 added since May.


https://qz.com/959770/donald-trump-s...ll-bombs-moab/

Why did Donald Trump just send dozens of troops to Somalia?

The end of his first 100 days as US president near, Donald Trump has changed gears when it comes his position on military intervention. As he was enjoying the “most beautiful” chocolate cake with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, he told the Chinese president that the US had fired missiles at a Syrian airfield, following Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack on his own people.

On April 13, the US dropped the “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB) on Afghanistan: The largest bomb it has used since World War II hit an ISIL tunnel complex. On the same day, as the tension between the US and North Korea escalated, NBC reported that Trump may be ready to launch strikes, prompting requests of caution from China and Russia.

And that’s not all: the US has announced April 14 that, for the first time since 1994, it’s deploying “dozens” of regular troops in Somalia to help the ongoing fight against al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s jihadist ally. They are to provide training and support to the Somali National Army and the African Union mission on the ground, Voice of America reported. The US troops will enhance what has been America’s small presence (three to 50 people) in the country to facilitate the military relationship between Somalia.

[sparebulb]

Seems like obama sent the US troops to west africa to fight ebola.

Isn't it interesting how when government fights something, you get more of it.

[Zippyjuan]

https://fpif.org/trumps-endless-wars/

Trump’s Endless Wars

Trump’s not bringing the troops home. He’s been haphazardly deploying more troops, drones, and dollars abroad, while waging a shadow foreign policy for his own benefit.

Donald Trump loves to talk about ending the endless U.S. wars that he inherited as president. He tweets about it. He endlessly criticizes his predecessors for their martial mistakes.

But like the old saw about the weather, Trump talks a whole lot about endless wars but doesn’t do anything about them.

Just this month, he went against the advice of pretty much everyone to pull 1,000 U.S. troops out of northern Syria where they were protecting a largely autonomous Kurdish region. The result has been an immediate flare-up in the Syrian conflict as Turkey sent troops over the border to take advantage of the U.S. withdrawal.

Then Trump turned around and sent an additional 2,000 troops to Saudi Arabia to help them defend against Iran or the Houthis or perhaps just internal critics of the regime.

In fact, the Trump administration has deployed 14,000 additional U.S. troops to the Middle East since the spring. Compare that with the 1,000 troops that Trump is withdrawing from northern Syria. The president seems more focused on starting fires than putting them out.

Last month, Trump promised a grand deal with the Taliban that would allow the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan. But that didn’t happen.

And what about the Kushner plan that was supposed to end the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine? Dead on arrival.

America’s drone wars? By March 2019, Trump has launched more drone strikes (2,243) than Obama did in his two terms in office (1,878).

Counter-insurgency campaigns in Africa? Trump has ordered a 10 percent cut in forces on the continent by 2022, but the total forces under the Africa Command actually went up by more than double that amount from 2017 to 2018 (6,000 to 7,500).

Containment of China? The Pentagon, under Trump, has made China its “number one priority,” and much of the increase in military spending in the Trump administration has gone to preparing for war with Beijing.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Trump has declared war on Congress, on the mainstream media, on anyone who disagrees with him. A recent video shows Trump mowing down all of his critics in an altered outtake from the movie, Kingsman. As a meme, it’s disgusting. As a metaphor, it’s chillingly accurate.

Let’s face it: Trump is not against endless war. He is the embodiment of endless war. It’s the essence of his operating system. He went into politics because he understood that it’s endless war by other means (and he’s always been too squeamish to fight in endless wars by ordinary means).

Once and for all, let’s bury the myth of Trump the dealmaker. He’s about as transactional as a heavyweight boxer. Remember: he was the host not of Let’s Make a Deal but of The Apprentice, in which he presided over a war of all against all with a single winner and lots of losers. He has simply brought that spirit of ungenerosity into the White House.

More at link.

[Anti Globalist]

Isn't it interesting how when government fights something, you get more of it.

It's almost as if that is entirely intentional.

[Swordsmyth]

https://www.businessinsider.com/trum...lection-2019-1




https://www.voanews.com/usa/trump-se...ps-middle-east



14,000 added since May.


https://qz.com/959770/donald-trump-s...ll-bombs-moab/

https://fpif.org/trumps-endless-wars/



More at link.

The clearest measure of Trump’s retrenchment efforts, or lack thereof, is foreign troop deployments. In the final months of Obama’s presidency, approximately 198,000 active duty U.S. military personnel were deployed overseas, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center. By comparison, the most recent figure for the Trump administration is 174,000 active duty troops. But even that difference reflects an accounting trick. Beginning in December 2017, the Defense Department started excluding troops deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria from its official reports, citing a vague need to “protect our forces.” When the estimated troop levels for those three countries are added back in, the current total is around 194,000—roughly equivalent to the number Trump inherited.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...-expanded-them


So even with the recent deployments meant to avoid starting a new war he has reduced the numbers by 4,000.

That means if we subtract the 14,000 he sent recently instead of starting a new war he had reduced them by 18,000.

We will be pulling out of lots of places.

[Zippyjuan]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...emergency.html

Has Anyone Told Donald Trump What He Just Ordered in Somalia?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The U.S. is committing itself to a long-term stabilization mission in a chronically unstable country. The mission involves training and equipping the local government forces to fight against jihadi insurgents and won’t end until those local forces are capable of fighting on their own. Unfortunately, recruitment is low and the training is slow going, in part because the local U.S.-backed government is weak and commands little public support. Under the pretext of fighting international terrorism, the U.S. is taking on a group that poses little direct threat to the United States, is being drawn into local conflicts unrelated to its ostensible mission, and risks creating more radicalization through civilian casualties.

It could be Iraq or Afghanistan (or substitute communist for jihadi and it could be any number of Cold War proxy conflicts), but in this case it’s Somalia.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order extending a 2010 declaration of national emergency related to the conflict in Somalia, reiterating that the U.S. remains “strongly committed to Somalia’s stabilization” and that the “situation with respect to Somalia continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

The U.S. currently has about 500 to 600 military personnel in Somalia, and they may be there for a while. As CNN reports, the U.S. mission “hinges on US Special Operations Forces being able to train an elite Somali army unit capable of defeating al Qaeda-linked militants on the ground.” The hope is that this group, known as Danab, will one day be an elite fighting force of about 3,000 troops capable of operating throughout the country, but right now it’s only about 500. One Pentagon official told CNN that it may take “approximately seven years for the Somalis to absorb all of these forces.”

Nearly two decades into the war on terror, critics of U.S. military intervention are accustomed to treating missions like this with skepticism. But in this case, the bigger question is, why isn’t the president more skeptical?

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to reduce U.S. military commitments overseas and a frustration over what he sees as U.S. troops being asked to fight other countries’ wars for them. One wonders whether he even realizes he’s committing U.S. troops to a seven-year mission to prop up the government of Somalia at a time when the country’s own neighbors are desperate to pull their troops out of the conflict. (And extending an Obama administration executive order on top of that!)

There’s an inherent contradiction in Trump’s worldview between his isolationist instincts and his commitment to standing out of the military’s way and letting the generals do what they think necessary—unlike the Obama administration’s approach, which he believes was burdensome and legalistic. Left to its own devices, the Pentagon tends to want more troops, more resources, and expanded missions.

This dynamic was on view recently in Syria. After declaring victory over ISIS, Trump ordered a full withdrawal of U.S. troops in December. Trump’s advisers and congressional allies eventually talked him down to leaving a peacekeeping force of 200 or even 1,000 troops in the country to protect U.S. allies on the ground and prevent ISIS’s return. This will probably remain the status quo until the next time Trump gets frustrated and tweets about it

The fight against al-Shabaab in Somalia has gotten far less attention from media and lawmakers than the fight against ISIS in Syria, and perhaps consequently, Trump appears to have taken little notice of it. And so, the war continues to expand with vague goals, no clear path to victory, and little to no pushback in Washington.

[Swordsmyth]

Zippy is panicking at the thought that Trump is going to bring the troops home.

LOL

[Zippyjuan]

Trump talks about it a lot but hasn't actually done it.

[Anti Federalist]

The US presence includes military trainers as well as a recently built $110 million drone base in Niger

What the $#@! is $110 million of my tax dollars doing building drone bases in $#@!ing Niger.

Enough is enough already...for $#@!'s sake.

Let the heathen Chinee pick up the white man's burden for the next hundred years on that god forsaken continent and go bankrupt and weak with self loathing.

I'm done with it.

[Swordsmyth]

Trump talks about it a lot but hasn't actually done it.

Yes he has.
An article you supplied proves it.

The clearest measure of Trump’s retrenchment efforts, or lack thereof, is foreign troop deployments. In the final months of Obama’s presidency, approximately 198,000 active duty U.S. military personnel were deployed overseas, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center. By comparison, the most recent figure for the Trump administration is 174,000 active duty troops. But even that difference reflects an accounting trick. Beginning in December 2017, the Defense Department started excluding troops deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria from its official reports, citing a vague need to “protect our forces.” When the estimated troop levels for those three countries are added back in, the current total is around 194,000—roughly equivalent to the number Trump inherited.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...-expanded-them


So even with the recent deployments meant to avoid starting a new war he has reduced the numbers by 4,000.

That means if we subtract the 14,000 he sent recently instead of starting a new war he had reduced them by 18,000.

[Swordsmyth]

What the $#@! is $110 million of my tax dollars doing building drone bases in $#@!ing Niger.

Enough is enough already...for $#@!'s sake.

Let the heathen Chinee pick up the white man's burden for the next hundred years on that god forsaken continent and go bankrupt and weak with self loathing.

I'm done with it.

Congress will fund that but it's like pulling teeth to get money for border security for our own border.

[Zippyjuan]

"If we subtract all the troops he sent, he has reduced troops!" That is like "If you don't count that entire cheesecake I ate- I ate a lot less today than usual."

[AngryCanadian]

These troops in Africa would be enough to make up for Southern American border to protect the borders.

[Swordsmyth]

"If we subtract all the troops he sent, he has reduced troops!" That is like "If you don't count that entire cheesecake I ate- I ate a lot less today than usual."

He has reduced them by 4,000 even if we don't subtract those he sent to allies in the ME to avoid declaring war on Iran.

[Anti Federalist]

These troops in Africa would be enough to make up for Southern American border to protect the borders.

Exactly.

But I have a strong position on immigration. I don't think that we should give amnesty and they become voters. But I do think we should deal with our borders. One way that I would suggest that we could do it is pay less attention to the borders between Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and bring our troops home and deal with the border. But why do we pay more attention to the borders overseas and less attention to the borders here at home? We now have a mess on the borders, and it has a lot more to do with it than just immigration, because we're financing some of this militarism against the drug dealers on the borders right now to the tune of over $1 billion. And there is a mess down there, but it's much bigger than just the immigration problem. - Ron Paul - Ames Iowa GOP Straw Poll Debate 11 Aug 2011

[Swordsmyth]

The House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat and Republican joined a growing chorus of lawmakers warning Defense Secretary Mark Esper to reconsider plans to reduce military forces in Africa.In a letter to Esper obtained by Defense News, HASC Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., and ranking member Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, urged the secretary to “carefully consider the adverse implications of reducing our force posture in Africa,” cautioning that the “the threat of violent extremism and terrorism persist” in the region overseen by U.S. Africa Command.
“A decrease in our investment now may result in the need for the United States to reinvest at many more times the cost down the road,” the HASC leaders wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 16. It was also signed by House Emerging Threats Subcommittee Chairman Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and ranking member Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/smith-thornbe...014332011.html

[Anti Federalist]

“A decrease in our investment now may result in the need for the United States to reinvest at many more times the cost down the road,” the HASC leaders wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 16. It was also signed by House Emerging Threats Subcommittee Chairman Jim Langevin, D-R.I.

Investment?

Investment??

Investment???

[Swordsmyth]

Investment?

Investment??

Investment???

He's probably making money on it.

[Origanalist]

We will pull out of lots of places.

[Anti Federalist]

Oh we will pull out...when we're finally broke and can't beg, borrow or steal another goddamned dime.

And just like the street mafia, when the whole operation goes tits up, the government mafia will bust the joint the out, they'll strike a match and burn it all down.

I'm convinced that's why they are pushing the "civil war" angle so hard, so the whole $#@!ing place finally cracks off and from Atlantic to Pacific, burns to the goddamned ground.

For the love of Christ, secession NOW!

$#@! you, pay me.

[Origanalist]

Oh we will pull out...when we're finally broke and can't beg, borrow or steal another goddamned dime.

And just like the street mafia, when the whole operation goes tits up, the government mafia will bust the joint the out, they'll strike a match and burn it all down.

I'm convinced that's why they are pushing the "civil war" angle so hard, so the whole $#@!ing place finally cracks off and from Atlantic to Pacific, burns to the goddamned ground.

For the love of Christ, secession NOW!

I have been at that point for decades, as have you.

[Pauls' Revere]

Seems like obama sent the US troops to west africa to fight ebola.

Yep, he sent some to Uganda. Not sure if was about Ebola though.

https://www.ft.com/content/b4c0b7a8-...1-00144feab49a

[Swordsmyth]

The U.S. military has switched from trying to degrade Islamic extremist groups in West Africa’s sprawling Sahel region to merely trying to contain them as their deadly threat increases, a new U.S. government report says.

More at: https://www.sfgate.com/world/article...c-15051340.php

[Zippyjuan]

The U.S. military has switched from trying to degrade Islamic extremist groups in West Africa’s sprawling Sahel region to merely trying to contain them as their deadly threat increases, a new U.S. government report says.

More at: https://www.sfgate.com/world/article...c-15051340.php

Consistent pressure on extremist groups is needed to weaken them, the report says, citing Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who has compared it to “mowing the lawn.” That need, along with the often slow development of local partners’ militaries, “could require ongoing commitment of U.S. military resources,” the report adds.

We will be withdrawing soon. Maybe.

[Todd]

We will pull out of lots of places.

Good lord....more sig material.