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Supreme Court OKs Trump 'Third Country' Deportation of Men Held in Desert Shipping Container
Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent to a previous ruling on the case that the decision exposes "thousands to the risk of torture or death."
Jul 03, 2025
The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to send eight men deported from the United States and currently in limbo on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to South Sudan, where only one of the deportees is from, under a policy of fast-tracking deportations to third countries.
In an apparent 7-2 unsigned decision, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the high court lifted an order from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocking the deportation of the men—who are originally from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Korea, South Sudan, and Vietnam—to war-torn South Sudan, one of the world's most dangerous countries.
NEW: The U.S. Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to send people subject to deportation to countries they have no connection with that are so dangerous the Trump administration advises Americans not to travel there. The case involves eight men the Trump regime wants to send to South Sudan.
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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 2:29 PM
The men, who have all been convicted of serious crimes in the United States, have been detained for six weeks at Camp Lemonnier, a U.S. base in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. They have been nearly constantly shackled and are under constant guard in a shipping container. The container reportedly is equipped with air conditioning.
Neither the United States nor South Sudan has explained what will happen to the men upon their arrival in the East African nation.
Last month, the Supreme Court temporarily lifted Murphy's preliminary injunction, which had enabled migrants to file claims of persecution before their deportation to counties where they have no ties in a highly controversial process called third-country removal.
Dissenting in that ruling, Sotomayor wrote that the ruling exposes "thousands to the risk of torture or death."
The administration then accused Murphy of defying the high court's ruling by insisting that the eight men still could not be sent to South Sudan and asked the justices for the clarification that came with Thursday's decision.
"They're now subject to imminent deportation to war torn South Sudan, a place where they have no ties and where it is possible, if not probable, that they will be arrested and detained upon arrival," Trina Realmuto, an attorney for the men, told Politico Thursday. "This ruling is condoning lawlessness."
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After Trump Deportation Attempt, Migrants and ICE Agents Stranded in Shipping Container in Djibouti
"This is a situation the government both created and can remedy if it so chooses," said a lawyer for the migrants.
Jun 06, 2025
The Trump administration could have sent eight migrants with deportation orders and the immigration agents who were escorting them to a facility in the U.S. after a federal judge recently barred officials from deporting them to war-torn South Sudan, where they could face persecution or torture.
Instead the administration sent them to U.S. Naval Base Camp Lemonnier in the East African country of Djibouti, where a court filing on Thursday said they face illness, the threat of rocket fire from nearby Yemen, temperatures that soar past 100°F daily, and rancid smoke from nearby burn pits where human waste and trash are incinerated.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, blamed U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy for "stranding" the 13 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and eight detainees at the naval base, where they have been housed since late May in a metal shipping container converted into a conference room with just six bunk beds.
The administration has frequently attacked judges for issuing rulings that have interfered with President Donald Trump's ability to carry out his anti-immigration agenda.
But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed to court transcripts that showed the Trump administration had requested the migrants and agents be sent to Camp Lemonnier.
"No one asked them to do and no court order forces them to do it," said Reichlin-Melnick Thursday.
In a court transcript, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told Murphy that "bringing them back would be a much broader remedy than necessary" and suggested the detainees could have a "reasonable fear interview where they are" in Djibouti to determine if they had a credible fear of persecution or torture if they were deported. Murphy had instructed officials to arrange reasonable fear interviews when he ruled in May that they could not be sent to South Sudan.
"The judge did NOT require that anyone be 'stranded' anywhere," said Reichlin-Melnick. "In fact, it was the Trump administration that asked the judge for permission to hold the men in Djibouti! ICE could literally bring the men to any other U.S. base (or back to the U.S.) at any time!"
Murphy's ruling in May interrupted a deportation flight carrying the migrants—who have been convicted of crimes and are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Vietnam—to South Sudan.
The judge said the flight violated his previous order from April 18, which prohibited the administration from sending immigrants to third countries without providing them a chance to request humanitarian protections. That ruling was underpinned by the Convention Against Torture, which bars governments from deporting people to countries where they could be face torture.
"The judge gave the government a choice as to how to remedy the government's violation of the court's order—either return them and comply with the order in the United States or comply with the order overseas," Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants, told The Intercept. "The government opted to comply overseas after telling the court that they had the ability to do so. This is a situation the government both created and can remedy if it so chooses."
The court filing on Thursday by Mellissa Harper of the Office of Refugee Resettlement described how within 72 hours of arriving at the makeshift detention facility in Djibouti, the agents and migrants began to suffer from symptoms for bacterial respiratory infections, including "coughing, difficulty breathing, fever, and achy joints."
The filing explained that they are unable to get tested to determine what the illness is, and there is only a small supply of inhalers, Tylenol, eye drops, and nasal spray to treat the symptoms.
Based on what was described, Politico's Kyle Cheney asked: "Why is the Trump administration forcing them to stay there?"
"ICE's claims of difficulties here are ENTIRELY self-inflicted," said Reichlin-Melnick. "THEY asked the judge for permission to hold the men in Djibouti. The plaintiffs wanted the men brought back here. I have sympathy for the low-level officers stuck there, but it's ALL their bosses' fault."
The administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay Murphy's order requiring screenings for the migrants, claiming that ruling violated officials' authority to deport immigrants to third countries if their home countries won't take them back.
But in the case of at least one of the migrants, Jesus Munoz Gutierrez, the government of his home country of Mexico was not informed that he had been sent to Djibouti.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested last month that Gutierrez could be repatriated if U.S. followed protocols to send him back to Mexico.
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director for Detention Watch Network, told Newsweek that the administration's insistence on detaining the migrants in a shipping container at Camp Lemonniere is "the latest move in Trump's shocking expansion of third country deportations."
"By expelling people out of sight and out of mind to remote prisons and war-torn, unstable countries," said Ghandehari, "the Trump regime is attempting to normalize the offshoring of immigration detention and third country deportations as a new and expanded model of incarceration and deportation."
Ghandehari added that "the use of shipping containers to detain people is heinous and enraging—and coupled with the extreme heat, disease, and threats of rocket attacks in Djibouti, can be deadly."
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'Unprecedented Threat' for East Africa as Larger Second Wave of Locust Crisis Arrives Amid Pandemic
As the coronavirus outbreak delays efforts to eradicate the pests, experts warn locust swarms could grow 20-fold.
Apr 10, 2020
While much of the world focuses on the coronavirus pandemic that has infected over 1.6 million people across the globe, East Africa is battling the worst invasion of desert locusts in decades--a monthslong "scourge of biblical proportions" that experts warn could get worse with a larger second wave already arriving in parts of the region.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which is shepherding the global response to the region's locust crisis, "estimates that locust numbers could grow another 20 times during the upcoming rainy season unless control activities are stepped up," U.N. News reported Thursday.
A Wednesday update from FAO's Locust Watch service warned:
The current situation in East Africa remains extremely alarming as hopper bands and an increasing number of new swarms form in northern and central Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Somalia. This represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods because it coincides with the beginning of the long rains and the planting season. Although ground and aerial control operations are in progress, widespread rains that fell in late March will allow the new swarms to mostly remain, mature and lay eggs while a few swarms could move from Kenya to Uganda, South Sudan and Ethiopia. During May, the eggs will hatch into hopper bands that will form new swarms in late June and July, which coincides with the start of the harvest.
The massive swarms, as Common Dreams has reported, are partly fueled by the climate crisis and have affected Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. The pests have also been spotted in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, and India.
The main method of battling locust swarms--which each can devour enough food to feed 35,000 people in a day--is the spraying of pesticides. Concerns are mounting that locust eradication efforts in the region will be increasingly hampered by pandemic-related travel restrictions and supplies problems.
"Suppliers of motorized sprayers and pesticides are facing major challenges with limited airfreight options to facilitate delivery," Cyril Ferrand, FAO's resilience team leader for East Africa, told EARTHER on March 30. "Purchased orders were placed [a] few weeks ago and pesticides expected last week in Kenya have been delayed by 10 days."
Ferrand said in a statement Thursday that "there is no significant slowdown" in efforts to stop the swarms across the region so far "because all the affected countries working with FAO consider desert locusts a national priority."
"While lockdown is becoming a reality, people engaged in the fight against the upsurge are still allowed to conduct surveillance, and air and ground control operations," he said. "The biggest challenge we are facing at the moment is the supply of pesticides and we have delays because global air freight has been reduced significantly."
"Our absolute priority is to prevent a breakdown in pesticide stocks in each country," Ferrand added. "That would be dramatic for rural populations whose livelihoods and food security depend on the success of our control campaign."
FAO has secured about $111.1 million of the $153.2 million it has requested to tackle the locust crisis and is supporting surveillance and pesticide application in 10 nations.
The U.N. agency continues to raise concerns about how locusts could impact the collective 20 million people already enduring food insecurity in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania--as well as an additional 15 million people in war-torn Yemen.
This is the worst locust invasion that Kenya has seen in 70 years. Quartz Africa reported Friday on current conditions in the country, where hoppers have been maturing into adults over the past month after hatching in February and early March:
These swarms are still immature, and take up to four weeks before they are ready to lay eggs. Kenya is more than halfway through this maturation cycle, and the new generation of locust swarms are expected to begin laying eggs within the week.
In Kenya, the locust maturation is coinciding with the onset of the rainy season. Farmers have been sowing crops of maize, beans, sorghum, barley, and millet during March and April, in hopes that a favorable rainy season will allow for abundant growth during late April and May. With the locust swarms gaining size and strength, experts fear that up to 100% of farmers' budding crops could be consumed, leaving some communities with nothing to harvest.
"The concern at the moment is that the desert locust will eat under-emerging plants," Ferrand told Quartz. "This very soft, green material, biomass leaves, rangeland, is, of course, the favorite food for the desert locusts."
As for the coronavirus pandemic that first emerged in China late last year, Africa has reported 562 deaths and nearly 11,000 COVID-19 cases, according to Al Jazeera, which are relatively low figures compared with other affected regions. However, the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that some African nations could see a significant spike in cases in the coming weeks.
"During the last four days, we can see that the numbers have already doubled," Michel Yao, the WHO Africa program manager for emergency response, said Thursday. "If the trend continues, and also learning from what happened in China and in Europe, some countries may face a huge peak very soon."
As Ferrand said in his March conversation with EARTHER: "How do we respond to the needs of the European countries and North American countries as well as the humanitarian and development assistance that is still so necessary in the continent of Africa? ...This is the challenge that we will have to face in 2020."
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'A Scourge of Biblical Proportions': UN Leaders Sound Alarm on East Africa Locust Crisis in Call for Global Response
The worst outbreak in decades has devastated crops across a region already enduring food insecurity, conflict, and climate impacts.
Feb 25, 2020
Top United Nations relief officials warned Tuesday that millions more in funding is needed to combat East Africa's worst outbreak of desert locusts in decades, arguing that "acting now to avert a food crisis is a more humane, effective, and cost efficient approach than responding to the aftermath of disaster."
"The locust upsurge affecting East Africa is a graphic and shocking reminder of this region's vulnerability."
--U.N. relief leaders
The call for international action came in a joint statement from Qu Dongyu, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); Mark Lowcock, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator; and David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP).
The U.N. leaders are especially concerned about the impact on East Africa, which they noted is "a region beset by climate- and conflict-related shocks. Millions of people are already acutely food insecure. Now they face another major hunger threat in the form of desert locusts."
"The locust upsurge affecting East Africa is a graphic and shocking reminder of this region's vulnerability," they said. "This is a scourge of biblical proportions. Yet as ancient as this scourge is, its scale today is unprecedented in modern times."
The swarms--at least partly fueled by the climate crisis--have affected Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beyond the African continent, locusts have also been spotted in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, and India.
While the FAO requested $76 million in funding for the crisis last month, only $33 million has been received or committed. According to the trio of U.N. officials, "As the locusts continue their invasion throughout eastern Africa, and more details emerge about the scale of need in affected areas, the cost of action has already doubled, to $138 million."
"We need to do more. WFP has estimated the cost of responding to the impact of locusts on food security alone to be at least 15 times higher than the cost of preventing the spread now," the statement said. "It is time for the international community to act more decisively. The math is clear, as is our moral obligation. Pay a little now, or pay a lot more later."
Crystal Wells, Africa spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Lancet last week that "the locusts are coming on the heels of what has been a very tumultuous year for East Africa. Last year, the region swung between conditions that were either too hot and dry, or too wet."
"At the same time, people in Somalia and parts of Ethiopia continued to suffer from violence," Wells added. "In real terms, this means that thousands of people who are already on the run from clashes were uprooted once again by droughts and floods--and today risk losing whatever is left to locusts. There is only so much people can withstand."
Desert locusts have a reproduction cycle of about three months, and mature swarms are currently laying eggs across the Horn of Africa. The Lancet pointed out that "rains starting in March and April are expected to boost the breeding and spread of locusts."
With $138 million funding, the U.N. agencies hope to both provide relief to communities where crops have already been devoured by locusts and prevent new swarms from emerging. According to the FAO, a swarm contains as many as 150 million desert locusts per square kilometer (0.39 square miles) and can consume the same amount of food per day as 35,000 people.
BBC News reported Wednesday on the difficulties of addressing the crisis in the hardest hit countries:
The FAO has told us that in three of the worst affected countries, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, they estimate that at least 100,000 hectares in each one needs to be sprayed with insecticide.
By the end of January, they were substantially short of this target in those countries in East Africa.
- Ethiopia 22,550 hectares
- Kenya 20,000 hectares (estimated)
- Somalia 15,000 hectares (estimated)
Given that the aerial spraying of pesticides is the primary method of battling locust swarms, "vehicles, planes, personal safety equipment, radios, GPS units, and camping equipment are badly needed" to help contain the current outbreak, BBC reported.
Stephen Njoka, head of the Desert Locust Control Organization for Eastern Africa, the regional body coordinating the fight against the locusts, told BBC: "We have a challenge in the number of aircraft available--there are not enough. Pesticides are also in short supply."
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The U.S. Military Moves Deeper into Africa
Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases Across That Continent
Apr 27, 2017
General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. "I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action," commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in March, when asked about Russian military personnel operating in North Africa. "We watch what they do with great concern."
And Russians aren't the only foreigners on Waldhauser's mind. He's also wary of a Chinese "military base" being built not far from Camp Lemonnier, a large U.S. facility in the tiny, sun-blasted nation of Djibouti. "They've never had an overseas base, and we've never had a base of... a peer competitor as close as this one happens to be," he said. "There are some very significant... operational security concerns."
At that press conference, Waldhauser mentioned still another base, an American one exposed by the Washington Post last October in an article titled, "U.S. has secretly expanded its global network of drone bases to North Africa." Five months later, the AFRICOM commander still sounded aggrieved. "The Washington Post story that said 'flying from a secret base in Tunisia.' It's not a secret base and it's not our base... We have no intention of establishing a base there."
Waldhauser's insistence that the U.S. had no base in Tunisia relied on a technicality, since that foreign airfield clearly functions as an American outpost. For years, AFRICOM has peddled the fiction that Djibouti is the site of its only "base" in Africa. "We continue to maintain one forward operating site on the continent, Camp Lemonnier," reads the command's 2017 posture statement. Spokespeople for the command regularly maintain that any other U.S. outposts are few and transitory -- "expeditionary" in military parlance.
While the U.S. maintains a vast empire of military installations around the world, with huge -- and hard to miss -- complexes throughout Europe and Asia, bases in Africa have been far better hidden. And if you listened only to AFRICOM officials, you might even assume that the U.S. military's footprint in Africa will soon be eclipsed by that of the Chinese or the Russians.
Highly classified internal AFRICOM files offer a radically different picture. A set of previously secret documents, obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act, offers clear evidence of a remarkable, far-ranging, and expanding network of outposts strung across the continent. In official plans for operations in 2015 that were drafted and issued the year before, Africa Command lists 36 U.S. outposts scattered across 24 African countries. These include low-profile locations -- from Kenya to South Sudan to a shadowy Libyan airfield -- that have never previously been mentioned in published reports. Today, according to an AFRICOM spokesperson, the number of these sites has actually swelled to 46, including "15 enduring locations." The newly disclosed numbers and redacted documents contradict more than a decade's worth of dissembling by U.S. Africa Command and shed new light on a constellation of bases integral to expanding U.S. military operations on the African continent and in the Middle East.
A Constellation of Bases
AFRICOM failed to respond to repeated requests for further information about the 46 bases, outposts, and staging areas currently dotting the continent. Nonetheless, the newly disclosed 2015 plans offer unique insights into the wide-ranging network of outposts, a constellation of bases that already provided the U.S. military with unprecedented continental reach.
Those documents divide U.S. bases into three categories: forward operating sites (FOSes), cooperative security locations (CSLs), and contingency locations (CLs). "In total, [the fiscal year 20]15 proposed posture will be 2 FOSes, 10 CSLs, and 22 CLs" state the documents. By spring 2015, the number of CSLs had already increased to 11, according to then-AFRICOM chief General David Rodriguez, in order to allow U.S. crisis-response forces to reach potential hot spots in West Africa. An appendix to the plan, also obtained by TomDispatch, actually lists 23 CLs, not 22. Another appendix mentions one additional contingency location.
These outposts -- of which forward operating sites are the most permanent and contingency locations the least so -- form the backbone of U.S. military operations on the continent and have been expanding at a rapid rate, particularly since the September 2012 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The plans also indicate that the U.S. military regularly juggles locations, shuttering sites and opening others, while upgrading contingency locations to cooperative security locations in response to changing conditions like, according to the documents, "increased threats emanating from the East, North-West, and Central regions" of the continent.
AFRICOM's 2017 posture statement notes, for example, a recent round of changes to the command's inventory of posts. The document explains that the U.S. military "closed five contingency locations and designated seven new contingency locations on the continent due to shifting requirements and identified gaps in our ability to counter threats and support ongoing operations." Today, according to AFRICOM spokesman Chuck Prichard, the total number of sites has jumped from the 36 cited in the 2015 plans to 46 -- a network now consisting of two forward operating sites, 13 cooperative security locations, and 31 contingency locations.
Location, Location, Location
AFRICOM's sprawling network of bases is crucial to its continent-wide strategy of training the militaries of African proxies and allies and conducting a multi-front campaign aimed at combating a disparate andspreading collection of terror groups. The command's major areas of effort involve: a shadow war against the militant group al-Shabaab in Somalia (a long-term campaign, ratcheting upin the Trump era, with no end in sight); attempts to contain the endless fallout from the 2011 U.S. and allied military intervention that ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi (a long-term effort with no end in sight); the neutralizing of "violent extremist organizations" across northwest Africa, the lands of the Sahel and Maghreb (a long-term effort with no end in sight); the degradation of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin nations of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad (a long-term effort -- to the tune of $156 million last year alone in support of regional proxies there -- with no end in sight); countering piracy in the Gulf of Guinea (a long-term effort with no end in sight), and winding down the wildly expensive effort to eliminate Joseph Kony and his murderous Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa (both live on, despite a long-term U.S. effort).
The U.S. military's multiplying outposts are also likely to prove vital to the Trump administration's expanding wars in the Middle East. African bases have long been essential, for instance, to Washington's ongoing shadow war in Yemen, which has seen a significant increase in drone strikes under the Trump administration. They have also been integral to operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, where a substantial (and deadly) uptick in U.S. airpower (and civilian casualties) has been evident in recent months.
In 2015, AFRICOM spokesman Anthony Falvo noted that the command's "strategic posture and presence are premised on the concept of a tailored, flexible, light footprint that leverages and supports the posture and presence of partners and is supported by expeditionary infrastructure." The declassified secret documents explicitly state that America's network of African bases is neither insignificant nor provisional. "USAFRICOM's posture requires a network of enduring and non-enduring locations across the continent," say the 2015 plans. "A developed network of FOSes, CSLs, and non-enduring CLs in key countries... is necessary to support the command's operations and engagements."
According to the files, AFRICOM's two forward operating sites are Djibouti's Camp Lemonnier and a base on the United Kingdom's Ascension Island off the west coast of Africa. Described as "enduring locations" with a sustained troop presence and "U.S.-owned real property," they serve as hubs for staging missions across the continent and for supplying the growing network of outposts there.
Lemonnier, the crown jewel of America's African bases, has expanded from 88 acres to about 600 acres since 2002, and in those years, the number of personnel there has increased exponentially as well. "Camp Lemonnier serves as a hub for multiple operations and security cooperation activities," reads AFRICOM's 2017 posture statement. "This base is essential to U.S. efforts in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula." Indeed, the formerly secret documents note that the base supports "U.S operations in Somalia CT [counterterrorism], Yemen CT, Gulf of Aden (counter-piracy), and a wide range of Security Assistance activities and programs throughout the region."
In 2015, when he announced the increase in cooperative security locations, then-AFRICOM chief David Rodriguez mentioned Senegal, Ghana, and Gabon as staging areas for the command's rapid reaction forces. Last June, outgoing U.S. Army Africa commander Major General Darryl Williams drew attention to a CSL in Uganda and one being set up in Botswana, adding, "We have very austere, lean, lily pads, if you will, all over Africa now."
CSL Entebbe in Uganda has, for example, long been an important air base for American forces in Africa, serving as a hub for surveillance aircraft. It also proved integral to Operation Oaken Steel, the July 2016 rapid deployment of troops to the U.S. Embassy in Juba, South Sudan, as that failed state (and failed U.S. nation-building effort) sank into yet more violence.
Libreville, Gabon, is listed in the documents as a "proposed CSL," but was actually used in 2014 and 2015 as a key base for Operation Echo Casemate, the joint U.S.-French-African military response to unrest in the Central African Republic.
AFRICOM's 2015 plan also lists cooperative security locations in Accra, Ghana; Gaborone, Botswana; Dakar, Senegal; Douala, Cameroon; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Mombasa, Kenya. While officially defined by the military as temporary locales capable of being scaled up for larger operations, any of these CSLs in Africa "may also function as a major logistics hub," according to the documents.
Contingency Plans
The formerly secret AFRICOM files note that the command has designated five contingency locations as "semi-permanent," 13 as "temporary," and four as "initial." These include a number of sites that have never previously been disclosed, including outposts in several countries that were actually at war when the documents were created. Listed among the CLs, for instance, is one in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, already in the midst of an ongoing civil war in 2014; one in Bangui, the capital of the periodically unstable Central African Republic; and another in Al-Wigh, a Saharan airfield in southern Libya located near that country's borders with Niger, Chad, and Algeria.
Officially classified as "non-enduring" locations, CLs are nonetheless among the most integral sites for U.S. operations on the continent. Today, according to AFRICOM's Prichard, the 31 contingency locations provide "access to support partners, counter threats, and protect U.S. interests in East, North, and West Africa."
AFRICOM did not provide the specific locations of the current crop of CLs, stating only that they "strive to increase access in crucial areas." The 2015 plans, however, provide ample detail on the areas that were most important to the command at that time. One such site is Camp Simba in Manda Bay, Kenya, also mentioned in a 2013 internal Pentagon study on secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen. At least two manned surveillance aircraft were based there at the time.
Chabelley Airfield in Djibouti is also mentioned in AFRICOM's 2015 plan. Once a spartan French Foreign Legion post, it has undergone substantial expansion in recent years as U.S. drone operations in that country were moved from Camp Lemonnier to this more remote location. It soon became a regional hub for unmanned aircraft not just for Africa but also for the Middle East. By the beginning of October 2015, for example, drones flown from Chabelley had already logged more than 24,000 hours of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions and were also, according to the Air Force, "responsible for the neutralization of 69 enemy fighters, including five high-valued individuals" in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
AFRICOM's inventory of CLs also includes sites in Nzara, South Sudan; Arlit, Niger; both Bamako and Gao, Mali; Kasenyi, Uganda; Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles; Monrovia, Liberia; Ouassa and Nema, Mauritania; Faya Largeau, Chad; Bujumbura, Burundi; Lakipia, the site of a Kenyan Air Force base; and another Kenyan airfield at Wajir that was upgraded and expanded by the U.S. Navy earlier in this decade, as well as an outpost in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, that was reportedly shuttered in 2015 after nearly five years of operation.
A longtime contingency location in Niamey, the capital of Niger, has seen marked growth in recent years as has a more remote location, a Nigerien military base at Agadez, listed among the "proposed" CSLs in the AFRICOM documents. The U.S. is, in fact, pouring $100 million into building up the base, according to a 2016 investigation by the Intercept. N'Djamena, Chad, the site of yet another "proposed CSL," has actually been used by the U.S. military for years. Troops and a drone were dispatched there in 2014 to aid in operations against Boko Haram and "base camp facilities" were constructed there, too.
The list of proposed CLs also includes sites in Berbera, a town in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, and in Mogadishu, the capital of neighboring Somalia (another locale used by American troops for years), as well as the towns of Baidoa and Bosaso. These or other outposts are likely to play increasingly important roles as the Trump administration ramps up its military activities in Somalia, the long-failed state that saw 18 U.S. personnel killed in the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" mission of 1993. Last month, for instance, President Trump relaxed rules aimed at preventing civilian casualties when the U.S. conducts drone strikes and commando raids in that country and so laid the foundation for a future escalation of the war against al-Shabaab there. This month, AFRICOM confirmed that dozens of soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division, a storied light infantry unit, would be deployed to that same country in order to train local forces to, as a spokesperson put it, "better fight" al-Shabaab.
Many other sites previously identified as U.S. outposts or staging areas are not listed in AFRICOM's 2015 plans, such as bases in Djema, Sam Ouandja, and Obo in the Central African Republic that were revealed, in recent years, by the Washington Post. Also missing is a newer drone base in Garoua, Cameroon, not to mention that Tunisian air base where the U.S. has been flying drones, according to AFRICOM's Waldhauser, "for quite some time."
Some bases may have been shuttered, while others may not yet have been put in service when the documents were produced. Ultimately, the reasons that these and many other previously identified bases are not included in the redacted secret files are unclear due to AFRICOM's refusal to offer comment, clarification, or additional information on the locations of its bases.
Base Desires
"Just as the U.S. pursues strategic interests in Africa, international competitors, including China and Russia, are doing the same," laments AFRICOM in its 2017 posture statement. "We continue to see international competitors engage with African partners in a manner contrary to the international norms of transparency."
Since it was established as an independent command in 2008, however, AFRICOM itself has been anything but transparent about its activities on the continent. The command's physical footprint may, in fact, have been its most jealously guarded secret. Today, thanks to AFRICOM's own internal documents, that secret is out and with AFRICOM's admission that it currently maintains "15 enduring locations," the long-peddled fiction of a combatant command with just one base in its area of operations has been laid to rest.
"Because of the size of Africa, because of the time and space and the distances, when it comes to special crisis-response-type activities, we need access in various places on the continent," said AFRICOM chief Waldhauser during his March press conference. These "various places" have also been integral to escalating American shadow wars, including a full-scale air campaign against the Islamic State in Libya, dubbed Operation Odyssey Lightning, which ended late last year, and ongoing intelligence-gathering missions and a continued U.S. troop presence in that country; drone assassinations and increased troop deployments in Somalia to counter al-Shabaab; and increasing engagement in a proxy war against Boko Haram militants in the Lake Chad region of Central Africa. For these and many more barely noticed U.S. military missions, America's sprawling, ever-expanding network of bases provides the crucial infrastructure for cross-continental combat by U.S. and allied forces, a low-profile support system for war-making in Africa and beyond.
Without its wide-ranging constellation of bases, it would be nearly impossible for the U.S. to carry out ceaseless low-profile military activities across the continent. As a result, AFRICOM continues to prefer shadows to sunlight. While the command provided figures on the total number of U.S. military bases, outposts, and staging areas in Africa, its spokespeople failed to respond to repeated requests to provide locations for any of the 46 current sites. While the whereabouts of the new outposts may still be secret, there's little doubt as to the trajectory of America's African footprint, which has increased by 10 locations -- a 28% jump -- in just over two years.
America's "enduring" African bases "give the United States options in the event of crisis and enable partner capacity building," according to AFRICOM's Chuck Prichard. They have also played a vital role in conflicts from Yemen to Iraq, Nigeria to Somalia. With the Trump administration escalating its wars in Africa and the Middle East, and the potential for more crises -- from catastrophic famines to spreading wars -- on the horizon, there's every reason to believe the U.S. military's footprint on the continent will continue to evolve, expand, and enlarge in the years ahead, outpost by outpost and base by base.
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The U.S. Military Pivots to Africa and That Continent Goes Down the Drain
Breaking AFRICOM's camouflage wall of silence
Aug 02, 2016
It's rare to hear one top military commander publicly badmouth another, call attention to his faults, or simply point out his shortcomings. Despite a seemingly endless supply of debacles from strategic setbacks to quagmire conflicts since 9/11, the top brass rarely criticize each other or, even in retirement, utter a word about the failings of their predecessors or successors. Think of it as the camouflage wall of silence. You may loathe him. You may badmouth him behind closed doors. You may have secretly hoped for his career to implode. But publicly point out failures? That's left to those further down the chain of command.
And yet that's effectively exactly what newly installed U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) chief, General Thomas Waldhauser, did earlier this year in a statement to the Senate Arms Services Committee (SASC). It's just that no one, almost certainly including Waldhauser himself, seemed to notice or recognize it for the criticism it was, including the people tasked with oversight of military operations and those in the media.
Over these last years, the number of personnel, missions, dollars spent, and special ops training efforts as well as drone bases and other outposts on the continent have all multiplied. At the same time, incoming AFRICOM commanders have been publicly warning about the escalating perils and challenges from terror groups that menace the command's area of operations. Almost no one, however -- neither those senators nor the media -- has raised pointed questions, no less demanded frank answers, about why such crises on the continent have so perfectly mirrored American military expansion.
Asked earlier this year about the difficulties he'd face if confirmed, Waldhauser was blunt: "A major challenge is effectively countering violent extremist organizations, especially the growth of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and ISIL in Libya."
That should have been a deja vu moment for some of those senators. Three years earlier, the man previously nominated to lead AFRICOM, General David Rodriguez, was asked the same question. His reply was suspiciously similar: "A major challenge is effectively countering violent extremist organizations, especially the growth of Mali as an al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb safe haven, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia."
All that had changed between 2013 and 2016, it seemed, was the addition of one more significant threat.
In the midst of Rodriguez's 2016 victory lap (as he was concluding 40 years of military service), Waldhauser publicly drew attention to just how ineffective his run as AFRICOM chief had been. Some might call it unkind -- a slap in the face for a decorated old soldier -- but perhaps turnabout is fair play. After all, in 2013, Rodriguez did much the same to his predecessor, General Carter Ham, when he offered his warning about the challenges on the continent.
Three years before that, in 2010, Ham appeared before the same committee and said, "I believe that the extremist threat that's emerging from East Africa is probably the greatest concern that Africa Command will face in the near future." Ham expressed no worry about threats posed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or Boko Haram. ISIL in Libya didn't even exist. And even that "greatest concern," al-Shabaab, was, Ham noted, "primarily focused on internal matters in Somalia."
In other words, over these last years, each incoming AFRICOM commander has offered a more dismal and dire assessment of the situation facing the U.S. military than his predecessor. Ham drew attention to only one major terror threat, Rodriguez to three, and Waldhauser to four.
His Own Worst Critic
That said, Waldhauser isn't the only AFRICOM chief to point a finger at Rodriguez's checkered record. Another American general cast an even darker shadow on the outgoing commander's three-year run overseeing Washington's shadow war in Africa:
"AFRICOM's priorities on the continent for the next several years will be... in East Africa to improve stability there. Most of that is built around the threat of al-Shabaab. And then, in the North and West Africa is really built around the challenges from Libya down to northern Mali and that region and that instability there creates many challenges... And then after that is the West Africa, really about the Boko Haram and the problem in Nigeria that is, unfortunately, crossing the boundary into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. So those are the big challenges and then just the normal ones that continue to be a challenge are the Gulf of Guinea... as well as countering the Lord's Resistance Army..."
That critic was, in fact, General David Rodriguez himself in an AFRICOM promotional video released on multiple social media platforms last month. It was posted on the very day that his command also touted its "more than 30 major exercises and more than 1,000 military to military engagements" between 2013 and 2015. It was hardly a surprise, however, that these two posts and the obvious conclusion to be drawn from them -- just how little AFRICOM'S growing set of ambitious continent-wide activities mattered when it came to the spread of terror movements -- went unattended and uncommented upon.
Waldhauser and Rodriguez have not, however, been alone in pointing out increased insecurity on the continent. "Terrorism and violent extremism are major sources of instability in Africa," Assistant Secretary Linda Thomas-Greenfield of the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May. "Terrorist organizations such as al-Shabaab, Boko Haram (which now calls itself the Islamic State in West Africa), al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and al-Murabitoun are conducting asymmetric campaigns that cause significant loss of innocent life and create potentially long-term humanitarian crises."
National intelligence director James Clapper, who called the continent "a hothouse for the emergence of extremist and rebel groups" in 2014, spoke of the dangers posed by the Lord's Resistance Army and al-Shabaab, as well as terror threats in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and Tunisia, and instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo, Burundi, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year.
And then there's Brigadier General Donald Bolduc who heads Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), the most elite U.S. troops on the continent. He painted a picture that was grimmer still. Last November, during a closed door presentation at the annual Special Operations Command Africa Commander's Conference in Garmisch, Germany, the SOCAFRICA chief drew attention not just to the threats of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, ISIL, and the Lord's Resistance Army, but also another "43 malign groups" operating in Africa, according to another set of documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
The growth of terror groups from the one named by Ham in 2010 to the 48 mentioned by Bolduc in 2015 is as remarkable as it has been unremarked upon, a record so bleak that it demands a congressional investigation that will, of course, never take place.
Questions Unasked, Questions Unanswered
U.S. Africa Command boasts that it "neutralizes transnational threats" and "prevents and mitigates conflict," while training local allies and proxies "in order to promote regional security, stability, and prosperity." Rodriguez's tenure was, however, marked by the very opposite: increasing numbers of lethal terror attacks across the continent including those in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tunisia. In fact, data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland shows that attacks have spiked over the last decade, roughly coinciding with AFRICOM's establishment. In 2007, just before it became an independent command, there were fewer than 400 such incidents annually in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, the number reached nearly 2,000.
While these statistics may be damning, they are no more so than the words of AFRICOM's own chiefs. Yet the senators who are supposed to provide oversight haven't seemed to bat an eye, let alone ask the obvious questions about why terror groups and terror attacks are proliferating as U.S. operations, bases, manpower, and engagement across the continent grow. (Note that this is, of course, the same Senate committee that Rodriguez misled, whether purposefully or inadvertently, earlier this year when it came to the number of U.S. military missions in Africa without -- again -- either apparent notice or any repercussions.)
In an era of too-big-to fail generals, an age in which top commanders from winless wars retire to take prominent posts at influential institutions and cash in with cushy jobs on corporate boards, AFRICOM chiefs have faced neither hard questions nor repercussions for the deteriorating situation. (Similar records -- heavy on setbacks, short on victories -- have been produced by Washington's war chiefs in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 15 years and they, too, have never led to official calls for any sort of accountability.)
Rodriguez is now planning on resting at his northern Virginia home for a few months and, as he told Stars and Stripes, seeing "what comes next."
U.S. Africa Command failed to respond to multiple requests for an interview with Rodriguez, but if he follows in the footsteps of the marquee names among fellow retired four-stars of his generation, like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, he'll supplement his six-figure pension with one or more lucrative private sector posts.
What comes next for AFRICOM will play out on the continent and in briefings before the Senate Armed Services Committee for years to come. If history is any guide, the number of terror groups on the continent will not decrease, the senators will fail to ask why this is so, and the media will follow their lead.
During his final days in command, AFRICOM released several more short videos of Rodriguez holding forth on varioius issues. In one of the last of these, the old soldier praised "the whole team" for accomplishing "a tremendous amount over the last several years." What exactly that was went unsaid, though it certainly wasn't achieving AFRICOM's mandate to "neutraliz[e] transnational threats." But what Rodriguez said next made a lot of sense. He noted that AFRICOM wasn't alone in it -- whatever it was. Washington, D.C., he said, had played a key role, too. In that, he couldn't have been more on target. The increasingly bleak outlook in Africa can't simply be laid at the feet of AFRICOM's commanders. Again and again, they've been upfront about the deteriorating situation. Washington has just preferred to look the other way.
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America's Secret African Drone War Against the Islamic State
Predators and the “Neutralization” of 69 People in Iraq and Syria
Dec 17, 2015
On October 7th, at an "undisclosed location" somewhere in "Southwest Asia," men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script. They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain. One of their leaders spoke of comraderie and honor, of forging a family and continuing a legacy.
While this might sound like the description of a scene from an Islamic State (IS) video or a clip from a militia battling them, it was, in fact, a U.S. Air Force "inactivation ceremony." There, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake handed over to Colonel John Orchard the "colors" of his drone unit as it slipped into an ethereal military limbo. But that doesn't mean the gathering had no connection to the Islamic State.
It did.
Within days, Drake was back in the United States surprising his family at a Disney "musical spectacular." Meanwhile, his former unit ended its most recent run having been responsible for the "neutralization of 69 enemy fighters," according to an officer who spoke at that October 7th ceremony. Exactly whom the unit's drones neutralized remains unclear, but an Air Force spokesman has for the first time revealed that Drake's force, based in the Horn of Africa, spent more than a year targeting the Islamic State as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the undeclared war on the militant group in Iraq and Syria. The Air Force has since taken steps to cover up the actions of the unit.
Base-Building in the Horn of Africa
From November 20, 2014, until October 7, 2015, Drake commanded the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, a unit operating under the auspices of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT), which flew MQ-1 Predator drones from Chabelley Airfield in the tiny sun-baked African nation of Djibouti. For the uninitiated, Chabelley is the other U.S. outpost in that country -- the site of America's lone avowed "major military facility" in Africa, Camp Lemonnier -- and a key node in an expanding archipelago of hush-hush American outposts that have spread across that continent since 9/11.
Last week, in fact, the New York Times reported on new Pentagon plans to counter the Islamic State by creating a hub-and-spoke network of bases and outposts stretching across southern Europe, the Greater Middle East, and Africa by "expanding existing bases in Djibouti and Afghanistan -- and... more basic installations in countries that could include Niger and Cameroon, where the United States now carries out unarmed surveillance drone missions, or will soon."
Weeks earlier, TomDispatch had revealed that those efforts were already well underway, drawing attention to key bases in Spain and Italy as well as 60 U.S. military outposts, port facilities, and other sites dotting the African continent, including those in Djibouti, Niger, and Cameroon. The Times cited a senior Pentagon official who noted that some colleagues are "advocating a larger string of new bases in West Africa," a plan TomDispatch had reported on early last year. The Times didn't mention Djibouti's secret drone base by name, but that airfield, Drake's home for almost a year, is now a crucial site in this expanding network of bases and was intimately involved in the war on the Islamic State a year before the Times took notice.
A few years ago, Chabelley was little more than a tarmac in the midst of a desert wasteland, an old French Foreign Legion outpost that had seemingly gone to seed. About 10 kilometers away, Camp Lemonnier, which shares a runway with the international airport in Djibouti's capital, was handling America's fighter aircraft and cargo planes, as well as drones carrying out secret assassination missions in Yemen and Somalia. By 2012, an average of 16 U.S. drones and four fighter jets were taking off or landing there each day. Soon, however, local air traffic controllers in the predominantly Muslim nation became incensed about the drones being used to kill fellow Muslims. At about the same time, those robotic planes taking off from the base began crashing, although the Air Force did not find Djiboutians responsible.
In February 2013, the Pentagon asked Congress to provide funding for "minimal facilities necessary to enable temporary operations" at Chabelley. That June, as the House Armed Services Committee noted, "the Government of Djibouti mandated that operations of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) cease from Camp Lemonnier, while allowing such operations to relocate to Chabelley Airfield." By the fall, the U.S. drone fleet had indeed been transferred to the more remote airstrip. "Since then, Chabelley Airfield has become more permanent. And it appears to have grown," says Dan Gettinger, co-founder and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College and the author of a guide to identifying drone bases from satellite imagery.
Despite the supposedly temporary nature of the site, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) "directed an expansion of operations" at Chabelley and, in May 2014, the U.S. signed a "long-term implementing arrangement" with the Djiboutian government to establish the airfield as an "enduring" base, according to documents provided to the House Appropriations Committee earlier this year by the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller).
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Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, April 2013.
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Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, August 2015.
The Djiboutian Solution to the Islamic State
As 2014 was coming to a close, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake took command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron at Chabelley. Under his watch, the unit reportedly carried out combat operations in support of three combatant commanders. AFCENT failed to respond to a request for clarification about which commands were involved, but Gettinger speculates that AFRICOM; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for the Greater Middle East; and Special Operations Command were the most likely.
Before U.S. drones moved from Camp Lemonnier to Chabelley, according to secret Pentagon documents exposed by the Intercept in October, a Special Operations task force based there conducted a drone assassination campaign in nearby Yemen and Somalia. Gettinger believes the missions continued after the move. "We know that MQ-1s have been involved in counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and Predators have for many years been flying missions over Yemen," he told me recently by phone, noting however that the strikes in Yemen have slowed of late.
"There were no U.S. drone strikes reported in Yemen in November, the second calendar month this year without a reported attack," researchers with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted earlier this month. After a lull since July, a November drone strike in Somalia killed at least five people, according to local reports. And just last week, the Pentagon announced that another U.S. strike in Somalia had killed Abdirahman Sandhere, a senior leader of the militant group al-Shabaab.
Drake's 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, however, focused its firepower on another target: the Islamic State. The unit was "a large contributor to OIR," according to Major Tim Smith of AFCENT Public Affairs, and "executed combat flight operations for AFCENT in support of Operation Inherent Resolve."
Based in Africa, it was, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kristi Beckman, director of public affairs at the Combined Air Operations Center at al-Udeid air base in Qatar, "a geographically separated unit." By the beginning of October 2015, drones flown out of Chabelley had already logged more than 24,000 hours of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), according to the chief of operations analysis and reconstructions of the 380th Expeditionary Operations Group, its parent unit. (In an Air Force news release, that officer was identified only as "Major Kori," evidently to obscure his identity.) According to Kori, Chabelley's drones were also "responsible for the neutralization of 69 enemy fighters, including five high-valued individuals."
AFCENT failed to provide additional details about the missions, those targeted, or that euphemism, "neutralization," which was once a favored term of the CIA's often muddled and sometimes murderous Phoenix Program that targeted the civilian "infrastructure" of America's enemies during the Vietnam War. Beckman did, however, confirm that "neutralizations" took place in Iraq and/or Syria.
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A satellite photo of Predator and Reaper drones at Chabelley Airfield during Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake's time in command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.
Despite the loss of a unit that had flown tens of thousands of hours of ISR missions and attacked scores of targets, Smith says that America's war on the Islamic State has not suffered. "Coalition efforts in the region are not hampered," he assured me. "Operation Inherent Resolve has the personnel and assets necessary to continue aerial dominance within the region," according to Smith. "Though the squadron isn't needed anymore, there is sufficient capability within the AOR [area of operations] to ensure the needs of the mission are met."
The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning for Drones in Djibouti?
Some commentators have speculated that the transfer of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron's Predators indicates a possible end to U.S. drone missions from Djibouti. Others suggest that the move offers a clear indication of demands for the robot aircraft elsewhere in the world.
There's no question about the demand for drones. The Air Force pushed back plans to retire the Predator by a year -- until 2018 -- and began outsourcing combat air patrols to civilian contractors to deal with a paucity of drone pilots at a moment of expanding operations. Last week, it unveiled a $3 billion plan, which must be approved by Congress, to significantly expand its drone program by doubling the number of pilots, deploying them to more bases, and adding scores of new drones to its arsenal.
All of this comes at a time when, according to a top AFRICOM commander, the Islamic State is making inroads in Africa from Nigeria to Somalia, and especially in Libya. "If Raqqa [the "capital" of its caliphate in Syria] is the nucleus, the nearest thing to the divided nucleus is probably Sirte," said Vice Admiral Michael Franken, the command's deputy for military operations, speaking of a Libyan city in which IS fighters are deeply entrenched. "From there they look to export their terror into Europe and elsewhere."
Dan Gettinger sees no end in sight for the use of the Djiboutian airfield or of American drones flying from there. "All the signs point to a more permanent installation at Chabelley," he says, noting a string of construction contracts awarded for the base in recent years. Indeed, at the end of October, Navy Seabees were constructing another aircraft maintenance pad there. This month, they are working to extend the apron -- where aircraft can be parked and serviced -- at the drone base. It's the Predator that's on its way out, he tells me. "I think the MQ-1 is becoming old hat at this point."
Like Gettinger, Jack Serle of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism sees the larger, more heavily armed cousins of the Predator, MQ-9 Reapers, as the future of drone operations at the satellite Djiboutian base. "I don't think this means the Predators the 60th launched and recovered are being retired -- I think they'll have been redeployed," he told me by email. "And I don't think this means Chabelley is denuded of drones. I think it means Reapers only will be operating out of there."
"The personnel that were assigned to the 60th were sent back to the states to retrain on other weapon systems and the assets were redistributed to the states, [European Command], and CENTCOM," AFCENT's Major Tim Smith told me. "And this unit has not been replaced with another." Military press materials suggest, however, that members of the 870th Air Expeditionary Squadron and the 33rd Expeditionary Special Operations Squadron have recently been operating at Chabelley airfield. The latter unit has been known to fly Reapers from there.
Family Planning
U.S. Air Forces Central Command failed to provide additional information in response to multiple requests for clarification about missions carried out by the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron. "Due to force protection concerns and operational security, I cannot discuss further," Smith explained, although how the security of an inactive unit could be compromised was unclear. Smith also referred me to AFRICOM for answers. That command, however, failed to respond to repeated questions about drone operations flown from Chabelley.
During the course of my reporting, the Air Force news release about the October 7th inactivation ceremony was removed from the AFCENT website, leaving only an error message -- "404 - Page not found!" -- where an article with minimalist details about the "neutralization" of "enemy fighters" by drones once stood. AFCENT failed to reply to a request for further information on the reason the story was withdrawn.
Nor did the command respond to a request for an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake. Before he traveled home to surprise his own family, however, Drake spoke of the "family" he had forged as, in the words of Major Kori, he "engaged enemies of the United States from Chabelley Airfield."
"My desire at the beginning was simple: make the squadron a family while still continuing the tradition of excellence the previous commanders already established," said Drake. "[I]f I took care of the people they took care of the mission... I am most proud of the family this squadron became."
Today, those words, along with photos of the ceremony, have vanished from AFCENT's website, joining a raft of information about America's war against the Islamic State, operations in Africa, and drone campaigns that the military has no interest in sharing with the taxpayers who foot the bill for all of it and in whose name it's carried out. For more than a year, U.S. drones flying out of Djibouti waged a secret war against the Islamic State. For more than a year, it went unreported on the nightly news, in the country's flagship newspapers, or evidently anywhere else.
The New York Times now reports that "the Pentagon has proposed a new plan to the White House to build up a string of military bases in Africa" and beyond, "bring[ing] an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system that would be able to confront regional threats from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups." But the expansion of Chabelley, the far flung network of bases of which it's a part, and the war on the Islamic State waged from it suggest that there is little "new" about the proposal. The facts on the ground indicate that the Pentagon's plan has been underway for a long time. What's new is its emergence from the shadows.
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