The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 Although our armed forces boast terrific civil affairs personnel, that’s not the face we should be seeking to por- tray to our neighbors, either in this hemisphere or in Africa. Instead, the primary executive agency for this sort of development work should always be USAID (as well as other organizations and agencies with experience in these fields). President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates need to wring every conceivable economy out of our defense structure to pay the bills for ongoing operations and re-equip our armed forces. This exigency offers a golden opportunity to review our existing geographic command struc- ture in light of post–Cold War changes. SOUTHCOM is a relic from an earlier era the U.S. should wish to put behind it, while AFRICOM is the result of a manufactured need and never should have been created at all. There is simply no need for a standalone four-star command in ei- ther Latin America or Africa to achieve U.S. national security goals. Either organization might be justifi- able in a world of unconstrained re- sources, but neither the world they were created for nor the current and foreseeable U.S. resource capacity jus- tifies them now. Both entities should be eliminated as soon as possible, with their resid- ual training and security assistance functions realigned within other com- mands or given to a new WEST- COM. S P E A K I N G O U T Retired Ambassador David Passage spent much of his Foreign Service career in politico-military affairs, including two details to DOD (for the CORDS program during the Vietnam War and as a political adviser to the U.S. Special Operations Com- mand from 1993 to 1996), and has worked with all U.S. regional military commands. He also served in the bu- reaus of African and Latin American affairs at the State Department, was director for Africa on the National Se- curity Council staff under President George H.W. Bush and was ambassa- dor to Botswana from 1990 to 1993. He now lectures at military schools and training facilities and mentors military exercises. He is also a mem- ber of the AFSA Governing Board.