Four-star Marine General Michael Langley, the new commander of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom), revealed two astounding secrets about U.S. military operations in Africa on 16 March 2023, when he appeared at the Senate Armed Services Committee annual hearing on the Africom budget request.
In his testimony, Langley disclosed that Africom has established a forward headquarters in Africa (in addition to its main headquarters in Stuttgart, German). When asked if Africom might follow the example of Central Command (which has its main headquarters in Tampa, Florida, but which has established a forward headquarters in Qatar), he replied that “I can talk about that in closed session, because we do have something established to that contract.”
General Langley also publicly and directly contradicted the repeated assertions by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and many other American officials that Washington did not want to make African countries choose between the United States and its Sino-Russian rivals. Washington’s actual view, he explained, was that “they make choices, and they make the wrong choices in siding with—going with either PRC or Russia for especially lethal aid.”
As Langley explained, this means that Washington should make it easier and faster for African governments to get American military equipment. African governments “come and they ask and said, hey General Langley, we don’t want your boots on the ground, we want your equipment.” But the U.S. arms sales program, “it’s moving too slow, Senator, just moving too slow and they make the wrong decisions.”
So African governments will be judged by the company they keep—the United States or Russia and China—and will be treated accordingly. Making the “wrong choices” or the “wrong decisions” will have consequences.
For additional information and data, see “Biden’s FY 2024 Budget Plan for Africa: Send More Guns” at africansecurity.org
Daniel Volman is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, and a specialist on U.S. military policy toward Africa and African security issues.
