Soldier, Spook, Statesman: Confessions from the Front Lines of America's Expeditionary Corps

MAP: The U.S. military currently has troops in these countries in #Africa

This is an interesting map shared with me by a friend who founded the American University War Studies group. It is great to see people finally following US Military involvement in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa of course. Though this has been coming for some time via AFRICOM. Africa is not a new thing. I was a member of the founding group of AFRICOM’s Intelligence Knowledge Directorate at Ft. Meade back in 2008 when it was stood up as a slice element from EUCOM. This was 6 years ago so nothing is that new in Africa.

Also remember that we have military people in nearly every country on the planet stationed in embassies as part of the Marine Security Groups and via the Defense Attaches, and various liaison and technically any NSA members (as NSA falls under DOD). The problem is that most people view deployment of personnel as a black or white issue – usually based off when they see a press release of sending “troops” to a country. It is critical that you realize these are scalable forces, meant to be able to shift the numbers from 1 to 1,000 when things heat up. This does include numbers of clandestine operatives in countries for acute or persistent operations.