The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

12 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 P resident Barack Obama faces many unenviable tasks, such as dealing with an imploding na- tional and global economy and a crush- ing budget deficit. Nothing he can do with respect to the biggest non-entitle- ment spending — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — can significantly alter his financial and economic dilemmas. And no pruning he might do can even begin to provide the resources needed to re-equip our armed forces with the hundreds of billions of dollars of materiel and munitions that have been expended in those current wars. Vehicles of all types are worn out; we are flying the wings off our aircraft and the rotors off our helicopters; and we are using much of our military equip- ment to within inches of its pro- grammed life. And we have yet to calculate the ultimate costs of restoring the necessary capacity for other contin- gencies. It should also be obvious that it would not be sensible for Pres. Obama to deal with this budgetary problem by telling his agency heads: “On the count of three, everyone take a deep breath and tighten your belt one notch.” In- stead, the new administration needs to seriously question the merits of axing whole programs — not merely shrink- ing each of them by 10 percent. With respect to the Department of Defense, one of our biggest-ticket items, Pres. Obama could easily achieve significant savings by taking a hard look at restructuring our present geographic military command structure, with the explicit purpose of eliminating two major components: the U.S. Southern Command (responsible for Latin America and the Caribbean) and the newly established Africa Command. The point of departure should not be a review of whether these two com- mands can be justified — for that sim- ply invites proponents to make the best case for keeping them. Rather, the question should be how to handle residual functions the U.S. might wish to retain (and there shouldn’t be many) within a realigned geographic com- mand structure that would consist of the European Command, Pacific Com- mand, Central Command and a new Western Hemisphere Command. This would combine NORTHCOM’s de- fense of the homeland with responsi- bility for limited military training, security cooperation and humanitarian assistance missions transferred to it from the former SOUTHCOM. Similarly, our military training and humanitarian assistance programs in Africa could revert to subcommands within EUCOM and CENTCOM, where they have historically been situ- ated — or be dealt with by a subcom- mand of WESTCOM. After all, if the U.S. Central Command (focused on the Middle East) can operate from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., there is no reason African security as- sistance functions can’t be dealt with from the States as well. EUCOM, PACOM and CENT- COM have clear, well-defined and un- questioned warfighting missions, as well as robust force structures to sup- port them. AFRICOM and SOUTH- COM do not and should not. Competing Rationales Our newest geographic command, the Africa Command, assumed its re- sponsibilities on Oct. 1, 2008. (Anyone interested in a detailed account of its establishment should read Ambassador Robert Gribbin’s excellent article in the May 2008 FSJ : “Implementing AFRI- COM: Tread Carefully.”) The new command was created partly because former Secretary of De- fense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to re- focus EUCOM exclusively on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the countries that emerged from the wreckage of the Warsaw Pact. The AFRICOM& SOUTHCOM: Reliquaria from an Earlier Age B Y D AVID P ASSAGE S PEAKING O UT Eliminating the Africa and Southern Commands would be a smart move, both for strategic and budgetary reasons.