Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 61

AFRICOM QUEEN

(Photo by Spc. David M. Shefchuk, U.S. Army)

Senegalese special operations forces conduct a beach-landing exercise during Flintlock 2016 in Saint Louis,
Senegal, 12 February 2016. Riverine operations like this are important in Military Zone 2 in Saint Louis
because the region has seven hundred kilometers of coastline. The exercise culminated a week of training
with Netherlands and U.S. special operation forces. Flintlock 2016 is designed to enhance interoperatibility
among all participating nations.

directly to airports near the disaster area for land-based
operations, to be sustained by a modularized auxiliary
cruiser when it arrives in the operational area.
The 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa demonstrated how U.S. troops could be pulled into a nonmilitary
crisis.28 With any type of disease crisis, a modularized
auxiliary cruiser could provide direct medical care, construction assistance, training, and even forward screening
of travelers leaving an infected region, in order to contain
the spread of disease.
Counter illicit flows of terrorists, people, narcotics,
and arms. The trafficking of people (whether refugees,
victims, criminals, or terrorists), drugs, and weapons
destabilizes the African states involved and destabilizes
or threatens others nearby or even outside the continent.
Manned aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles could be
projected and deployed ashore using modularized auxiliary cruisers, to find and track such potentially destabilizing flows through African countries. The cruisers could
deliver ground forces to support local security or limited
military missions.
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Using modularized auxiliary cruisers
with helicopter and
boarding modules,
USAFRICOM
could work with
other commands to
help monitor and
interdict flows of
narcotics to Africa
from South America
and South Asia.29
It could work with
USEUCOM in the
Mediterranean Sea or
with USCENTCOM
in the Red Sea and
in the waters off of
the Horn of Africa,
where Iranian weapons shipments have
been dispatched to
support rebel factions
in Yemen and Hamas
in Gaza.30

A Successful Economy-of-Force
Mission
With an extensive coastline, and many parts of the
continent close to international waters but far from established American or allied bases to project land power, seabased platforms are vital for USAFRICOM to succeed
in its missions. Unfortunately, the Navy cannot routinely
provide the naval assets necessary. In a June 2013 article,
Megan Eckstein describes recent Marine Corps efforts to
enlarge the amphibious ship fleet by using “nontraditional
platforms” and foreign navies’ ships.31 The U.S. Marines
recognize that even with MV-22s, their Spain-based units
have a relatively short radius of action in Africa without
the ability to deploy by sea.
Like Humphrey Bogart’s fictional tramp steamer
in the 1951 film African Queen, which was modified
to carry out a military mission in East Africa during
World War I, sea-based platforms to deploy combat
power do not need to be expensive vessels. The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Marine Corps
Gen. John F. Kelly, stated that naval needs for drug
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