• U.S. Achieves Deep Penetration of African Armed Forces
• What is AFRICOM?
• Obama moves ahead with AFRICOM
• Official AFRICOM website
by David Isenberg
AFRICA: The Mother of All PMC
With all the attention being paid to private military and security contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan it is easy to forget they operate in other parts of the world. But it would be wrong to do so. While PMCs are to the best of my knowledge not, at least not yet, operating in the Arctic, they are just about everywhere else.
And one region where they are increasingly prominent is Africa, the region most closely identified with the modern private security contractor. This is the region that produced the now disbanded Executive Outcomes, the most famous PMC in modern history. Just as Africa is the birthplace of humanity it is also the birthplace of the modern PMC.
While EO no longer exists the use of PMC by the U.S. and commercial firms has steadily increased.
One impetus for the growth of PMC there was the Pentagon's October 2007 establishment of AFRICOM (United States African Command), the U.S. military's most recent unified command. To its credit, unlike other unified commands, AFRICOM, responsible for military relations with 53 African nations, focuses on war-prevention, rather than war-fighting. But because the U.S. military deliberately chooses to keep a small military presence in Africa it must rely to a greater degree on private contractors.
Read more @ The Mother of All PMC
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