Excerpts:

To Linder, the art of special warfare is exactly that: an art. “Nobody is born with the natural skill for this art. It comes from years of study.” At Fort Bragg during the qualification course, operators are thrown into an exercise called Robin Sage. Their “survival” depends on their ability to influence a guerrilla chief who controls when and whether they eat, sleep and succeed at their objective. What makes special operators special, according to Linder, has nothing to do with high-tech gear. Linder tells his men, “You can win buck naked with a butter knife.”

...

Linder has appeared on every significant battleground of the last 30 years — Central and South America, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines and Africa. His military career parallels America’s deployment of Special Operations forces in the post-World War II era. Like many operators of his generation, Linder served in the jungles of Colombia, where he searched for Pablo Escobar, the cartel leader who walked out of his self-appointed luxury prison in 1992. “All the guard towers faced out,” Linder said with a smile.

..

In 2005 and 2006, Linder served as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force — Philippines. His job was to root out the militant group Abu Sayyaf from the islands in the nation’s south. Linder, then a colonel, set up operations on an Abu Sayyaf-controlled island called Jolo. There was no how-to manual; he fought the enemy however he saw fit. Linder thrived in this jungle environment. He employed the methods he learned and taught at Fort Bragg. The emphasis, as it would later be in Africa, was on building relationships with local people. “This isn’t something that we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “That’s S.O.F. 101.”

...

Correction: June 13, 2014 

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article paraphrased incorrectly from comments by Edward Price, the assistant press secretary of the National Security Council. Responding to criticism about the lack of oversight of counterterrorism efforts in Africa, Mr. Price said that the White House — not the State Department — planned to put such checks in place.

Can General Linder’s Special Operations Forces Stop the Next Terrorist Threat?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/can-general-linders-special-operations-forces-stop-the-next-terrorist-threat.html?_r=0

By ELIZA GRISWOLDJUNE 13, 2014

Photo

American Green Berets and Uganda People’s Defense Force soldiers at an airstrip in Obo, Central African Republic. CreditMichael Christopher Brown/Magnum, for The New York Times

“My job is to look at Africa and see where the threat to the United States is,” Linder said as he unfolded his map and traced circles around the territories where he knew extremist groups were operating. “I see Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Libyan problem set, Al Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, Benghazi and Darna.”On a searing morning this spring, Brig. Gen. James B. Linder leaned against the red-webbing seats of a C-130 as it flew over the Sahara. On his camouflaged knee, he balanced two dog-eared Moleskine notebooks and a map of Africa. Linder, who is in his early 50s, commands the United States Special Operations forces in Africa. He was on his way to visit a detachment of 12 Army Green Berets training with African troops to fight Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Niger. Through the plane’s scratched plexiglass portholes, dunes crested like waves in an ocean of sand, and hot blasts of wind buffeted the fuselage. An hour’s flight to the south, his team of Special Forces was deployed along the Nigerian border, where the militant group Boko Haram was targeting children in its bid to establish an Islamic state.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/can-general-linders-special-operations-forces-stop-the-next-terrorist-threat.html?_r=0

Contractors’ Next Payday: Commando Logistics for Africa Shadow Wars

As I have often noted, I if you want to know what operations are being conducted or where the priorities might be just check the contract announcements.  Little is done without contracting support today and nearly all contract work is done unclassified (by necessity) and therefore a lot can be learned through the study of contracting requests for proposals and the like.  It is a fact of life and one with which we have to deal (as long we we have to use DoD contracting procedures) but it makes it difficult to maintain operational security.  

V/R

Dave

Contractors’ Next Payday: Commando Logistics for Africa Shadow Wars

BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN04.12.136:30 AM
HTTP://WWW.WIRED.COM/DANGERROOM/2013/04/AFRICA-COMMANDO-CONTRACTORS/

A Casa 212 contracted for Afghanistan drops supplies to paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade on Nov. 9, 2007. It’s now likely headed to Africa. Photo: Army

Here’s how serious the U.S. is about its African war on terror. The Pentagon is preparing to spend millions to create a privatized flying taxi service to fly its commandos everywhere from Libya to Congo.

That’s according to details in a recent solicitation notice for a Defense Department contract worth up to $50 million, expected to be handed over to a private contracting firm in August. Among the two main tasks contractors will be expected to carry out: medical evacuations during “high risk activities” — capable of being launched within a three-hour notice — as well as transporting equipment and commandos from Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara (or JSOTF-TS) within the borders of potentially 20 African nations. When you want to keep a U.S. military footprint small, you have to contract out a lot of logistics services.

Based at a secretive military airfield in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the contractors will be tasked with missions across central and northern Africa, with the most likely destinations being Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania and other countries including Algeria, Cameroon and Nigeria. Less likely, but within the contractor’s “primary operating areas,” are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan and Uganda — all suspected to be likely hiding spots for warlord Joseph Kony.

There’s no shortage of targets. Asisde from Kony to the east, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreboperates just to the north. Drug traffickers are everywhere. In Nigeria, there’s Islamic terror groupBoko Haram. Both have fallen under AFRICOM’s hit list.

“Passengers will possibly travel with personal weapons (small arms) and small amounts of ammunition,” the solicitation notes. Among other requirements: the contractor’s plane must be able to carry a minimum of six passengers or 2,500 pounds of equipment and operate up to 1,000 flight hours per year for up to more than four years. The contractors need to be capable of air-dropping both equipment bundles prepared by the U.S. government and conducting “static-line, personnel air drop operations.” (Although, the solicitation clarifies, these drops are to be “used sparingly.”)

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HTTP://WWW.WIRED.COM/DANGERROOM/2013/04/AFRICA-COMMANDO-CONTRACTORS/

Al Qaeda Is Alive in Africa A witches' brew of Islamic jihadists is stirring up trouble across the continent. But is that America's problem yet?

Al Qaeda Is Alive in Africa

A witches' brew of Islamic jihadists is stirring up trouble across the continent. But is that America's problem yet?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/17/al_qaeda_is_alive_in_africa?page=full

BY DANIEL BYMAN | JANUARY 17, 2013

It has been over a year and a half since Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it seems like al Qaeda is everywhere: from Algeria to Somalia, from Mali to Yemen, from Pakistan to Iraq. In July 2011, arriving in Afghanistan on his first trip as U.S. defense secretary, Leon Panetta said, "We're within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda." But on Wednesday, Jan. 16, Panetta seemed to express a good deal less optimism, making clear that the Algerian hostage crisis currently unfolding was "an al Qaeda operation." So has al Qaeda really become this web of linked groups around the world pursuing a common jihad against the West? And what is the relationship between the al Qaeda core and its affiliate organizations?

These are important questions; the debate about whether the United States should join the French and step up involvement against jihadi groups in Mali centers on these complicated ties. For while al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his lieutenants in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area consume much of our thinking on al Qaeda, the United States is also fighting al Qaeda affiliates like al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and al-Shabab in Somalia, which is also linked to al Qaeda.

In 2012, the United States conducted more drone strikes on AQAP targets than it did against al Qaeda core targets in Pakistan. In Mali, U.S. concern is heightened by reports that some among the wide range of local jihadi groupslike Ansar Dine have ties to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). If groups in Mali and other local fighters are best thought of as part of al Qaeda, then an aggressive effort is warranted. But if these groups, however brutal -- and despite the allegiances to the mother ship they claim -- are really only fighting to advance local or regional ambitions, then the case for direct U.S. involvement is weak. The reality is that affiliation does advance al Qaeda's agenda, but the relationship is often frayed and the whole is frequently far less than the sum of its parts.

Al Qaeda has always sought to be a vanguard that would lead the jihadi struggle against the United States. Abdullah Azzam, one of the most influential jihadi thinkers and a companion of bin Laden, wrote, "Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward" and that this vanguard is a "solid base" -- a phrase from which al Qaeda draws its very name. At the same time, al Qaeda sought to support and unify local Muslim groups as they warred against apostate governments such as the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia and Hosni Mubarak's Egypt. Convincing local groups to fight under the al Qaeda banner seems to neatly combine these goals, demonstrating that the mother organization -- now under Zawahiri -- remains in charge, while advancing the local and regional agendas that the core supports.

More practically, in the past, the al Qaeda core has offered affiliates money and safe haven. In Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree in Pakistan, jihadists from affiliated groups came to train and learn and proved far more formidable when they returned to their home war zones. They also returned with a more global agenda, advancing the core's mission of shaping the jihadi movement. It also gave the core a new zone of operational access to conduct terrorist attacks in other places. Perhaps most importantly, the core al Qaeda managed to change the nature of the affiliates' attacks, so that in addition to continuing to strike at local regime forces, they also select targets more in keeping with the core's anti-Western goals. AQIM's attack this week on Western tourists and foreign oil workers in Algeria mimics the change in strategy. AQAP has taken this one step further and gone after the United States outside its region, twice launching sophisticated attacks on U.S. civil aviation.

Yet affiliation is risky for all concerned. Some groups come to al Qaeda as damaged goods: AQIM, for example, largely lost its struggle in Algeria before it came under the core banner. AQI committed a series of brutal atrocities in Iraq despite the chastisement of al Qaeda leaders and in so doing provoked a firestorm of criticism from previously sympathetic clerics in the Muslim world. In documents captured in the Abbottabad raid, one jihadist had warned bin Laden, "The problem is that al Qaeda has become a broad field; each can enter." The implication: By absorbing these far-flung franchises under its banner, the core could not disassociate itself from the actions of far-flung affiliates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, al Qaeda leaders explored whether they could cut ties to some of these groups.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/17/al_qaeda_is_alive_in_africa?page=full

Army plans to shift troops to U.S. Africa Command: Aims for quick crisis response

There can be no "quick crisis response" unless the force is in the right staging location)s) and there is dedicated airlift which of course is the same requirement for Commander's In-Extremis Force.

V/R

Dave

Army plans to shift troops to U.S. Africa Command

Aims for quick crisis response

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/23/army-plans-to-shift-troops-to-us-africa-command/?page=all#pagebreak

By Kristina Wong

-

The Washington Times

Sunday, December 23, 2012

U.S. Africa Command, the military’s newest regional force, will have more troops available early next year as the Pentagon winds down from two ground wars over the past decade, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Army chief of staff, told The Washington Times.

As part of Gen. Odierno’s Regionally Aligned Forces concept, about 1,200 soldiers will deploy to Africa as early as March in an effort to place troops strategically around the globe to respond quickly to sudden challenges in hot spots such as Libya and to develop ties with the people and officials in host countries.

“It’s about us moving towards a scalable, tailorable capability that helps them to shape the environment they’re working in, doing a variety of tasks from building partner capability to engagement, to multilateral training to bilateral training to actual deployment of forces, if necessary,” Gen. Odierno said in an interview.

Amid budget cuts and with President Obama’s new military strategy downplaying the chances of another major land war, the Army has sought to maintain its relevance among admirals and generals in the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa — likely places for the next flash point. When terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, no U.S. troops were close enough to help.

Gen. Odierno, the Army’s 38th chief of staff, said the idea for the Regionally Aligned Forces came to him during his tours of duty as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and as the commander of U.S. Joint Forces. He realized then that combatant commanders — the generals and admirals conducting foreign operations — wanted better-defined support for their missions and were not getting it from the Army because it was engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/23/army-plans-to-shift-troops-to-us-africa-command/?page=all#pagebreak