David Axe needs a camera, and he could also use money for expenses. If you can spare the change, buy David a happy meal, $5 in New York (hey its a taxation state!). Support journalists who will go to Africa and cover the stories of value, the stories and perspectives that will eventually end up being evaluated as part of the research of those who study such trivial things like National Strategy and Strategic Communications. The public affairs folks apart of APS are fantastic, no question about that, but the Navy needs other journalists there to insure that Navy soft power connects to a broader domestic audience. These programs are important, but are largely understood by the masses. Journalists like David Axe makes the difference in telling the story of naval soft power to the masses, the same masses that would otherwise never know our international outreach even happened.

BAIDOA, Somalia Jan 20 (Garowe Online) – Ethiopian troops still deployed in parts of Somalia have began training hundreds of Somali policemen in a bid to boost local security, even as questions arise from the continued presence of Ethiopian forces, Radio Garowe reports.

The training began Tuesday in the southwestern town of Baidoa, 250km northwest of Mogadishu.

Ethiopian military officers will be training 200 new police cadets, who have been recruited from different districts of Bay region, where Baidoa is located.

The police training is being conducted at the airfield and the presidential compound in Baidoa, local officials said.

probably in violation of the arms embargo, like all the other times

It would be nice if the US would give this kind of communications support to US first responders, so they would be able to communicate in emergencies. It has been talked about since 9/11, but I gather not much has been done except to give cronies fat contracts that accomplished nothing.

And I am sure this exercise does support a lot of US goals, helping African countries to help the US to help itself to their own and each others’ resources.

Communications specialists from Africa’s armies and the United States are working out how units from different countries can talk to each other as part of a future continental peacekeeping standby force.

…

Communications experts from around 25 African armies and the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) are meeting in Senegal this week to plan a continental exercise in Gabon in July, the third of its kind and intended to pave the way for a common communications platform.

“The aim is to devise a transmission architecture for control, command and coordination, as well as an information system, for an eventual African Union peacekeeping force,” Captain Mouhamadou Sylla, of the Senegalese army, told Reuters.

“Everybody needs to speak the same language,” he said.

…

But regardless of the language being spoken, the exercise known as “Africa Endeavor” will ensure military units can exchange information and orders with units from other countries by ensuring equipment and communications methods are compatible.

“We’re looking not just at communications within countries, but also between countries, military to military as well as military to civilian agencies,” [U.S. Air Force Major Eric Hilliard, of the Africa Command (Africom)] said.

…

“This exercise supports a lot of U.S. goals … helping the African countries work together to help each other,” he said.

5GW or nation building, or stability operations, or proxy war all boil down to these 3 steps:
* Destabilize a country or region using proxies
* Bring in aid/peacekeeping/stability operations
* Establish a nominal new government and train its military to be proxies, nation building, so that it will act as an obedient client state, a de facto colony (and the new proxies can be used to stabilize/destabilize other regions.)

I watched the proxy wars in the 1980s when the US and the USSR did all these things. That should have discredited the concept. I saw the horrors as the after effects played out in the 90s when the US and USSR stepped back, but the arms trade and military rivalries they began and nurtured continued to grow. For example every militant group that ravaged Liberia got its initial training and leadership start with the training the US supplied to Samuel Doe’s forces when he overthrew the elected government of Liberia. In Sudan the US CIA is good buddies with the Sudanese security services and often cooperate with them. The US has played on many sides of the conflicts in Sudan for decades.

You quote:

For the humanitarian aspects of fifth-gen warfare, especially, there are some serious obstacles, Beebe said. “It looks like a military invasion of humanitarian space. It looks like a militarization of foreign policy. It looks like a lot of things bad if you’re taking it through an old-world paradigm.”

But that paradigm has to evolve, Beebe stressed, if the Pentagon is to effectively beat the latest threats to national and international security. In the fifth-generation of war, functions once considered strictly peaceful — such as delivering food aid to starving refugees or injecting cash into police payrolls — become battlefield tactics against an enemy whose favorite weapons are human suffering, fear and instability.

To me the first paragraph quoted above sounds exactly like those words by Bush’s aid, generally attributed to Karl Rove:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Just read “the reality based community” for “an old-world paradigm”

And “that paradigm has to evolve” sounds like the rest of what Rove was saying:

And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

And the problem is, in destabilizing a region in order to follow up with “nation building”, the tools are human suffering, fear and instability, often known as terrorism. These are US weapons, our weapons. Using proxies (in Somalia by sponsoring the Ethiopian invasion, and bombing civilians in support, and imposing a hated government of warlords) allows the principals/US to pretend their/our hands are clean. But real people die, many more real people suffer horribly. The US/we stand back with “clean” hands, reap the profits, oil, minerals, etc, and the targets and the proxies suffer the loss of blood and treasure. Old paradigm or new paradigm, this does not change. I know you have seen this, but the point seems to be lost in your writing.

I realize that if I were embedded with US forces I would not want to write anything to disrespect any of the people I was working with, who had shown me kindness and hospitality, and had spoken to me honestly. I cannot really speak to the ethical dilemma this creates, other than to say it creates an ethical dilemma.

Again, I do appreciate you taking the trouble to visit and comment.

@b real, Thank you for the links and thoughtful comments. As to Kaplan, too sick! I have tried to address some of why it is so sick here.

just reread what i typed earlier – should have clarified that i was referring to training of somali police since the TFG entered mogadishu in early 2007. and i must have really been in a hurry, as i have no idea why i mentioned investigative reporting…

also, here’s axe’s latest press release for the u.s. military – U.S. Wages First Battles in New Generation of War, devoid of context or critical examination, as usual

from what i’ve gathered, most of the training of somali police forces has been under the authority of the ethiopians

but then there’s this new outta nairobi today from kenya broadcasting company

Kenya will not deploy any troops to Somalia but is willing and ready to contribute in building Somali capacity through training Somali police, customs officials, immigration officers, army personnel, and border guards, Minister for Foreign Affairs Moses Wetang’ula has said.

In a meeting with acting President and Speaker of Somalia parliament, Sheikh Adan Mohamed Nuur Madobe at a Nairobi Hotel, the Minister reiterated that President Mwai Kibaki supported the IGAD special summit to be held before the January 15 this year and that the developments in Somalia would add a new dimension to the agenda of the summit.

kenya is very involved in the east african standby brigade, though, which is an entirely different beast, part of a larger effort to amass proxy forces for pax americana on the continent & beyond

[older, but still very relevant context from le monde diplomatic -- United States: the new scramble for Africa]

re AFRICOM’s role in this, & loosely tying in to somalia, here’s one:

Africom plans to incorporate its new ADAPT –– Africa Deployment Assistance Phased Training –– initiative into the mission, Crawley said. This effort aims to teach militaries the logistical skills required to deploy in support of peacekeeping missions. The ADAPT initiative was first used last summer in transporting peacekeepers into Somalia from Uganda, he said.

AFRICOM has been much more involved than just transport, though. that’s what i would expect a good investigative reporter to elaborate on.

finally, fitting into the larger picture here

quoting (not endorsing) robert kaplan

The word imperial is one in which the U.S. public and the military is uncomfortable. But the fact remains we are in an imperial like situation around the world. The challenges, the frustration, the goals we deal with are comparable to those faced by the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Turks, the Austrians, all and going right back to the Romans during their high point of empire. And what does imperialism mean in this sense?

It means training host country troops to push them forward, let them take the credit. It is about small numbers; two-thirds of all the engagements the British and French fought were with native indigenous troops, not with their own. Most of what the roman military did in North Africa was train the local indigenous forces.

So imperialism is a word none of us like. But when it’s done smartly, we all like the result. One example, this past summer, I was in Algeria, in sub-Saharan Africa. The United States military is training indigenous troops across the Sahara to create a pan African intervention force to deal with future humanitarian emergencies like Darfur. That’s the kind of imperialism people like.

sick!

The current State/Africom involvement in Somalia is just the latest chapter in a long history of U.S. involvement (some would say “meddling”) in the country.