AFRICOM Commander: SpecOps Cuts Won’t Help China, But We Could Use More Regular Troops (Interview) by Katie Bo Williams - Defense One
“It’s really a misleading narrative to say that optimization is causing us to walk away from Africa,” Gen. Waldhauser said in an interview.
The Trump administration’s planned U.S. troop reduction in Africa over the next two years will be minimal and won’t undercut the United States’ ability to counter China and Russia, according to the commanding general of U.S. Africa Command. But adding conventional forces would help U.S. efforts to build up local militaries and signal to them that America is a better long-term partner than Beijing, he said.
AFRICOM will remove fewer than 130 special operations troops across the continent by June 2020, according to Gen. Thomas Waldhauser.
“I think it’s important not to conflate the optimization [of counterterrorism forces] and great power competition,” Waldhauser said in an interview. “Where we’re training counterterrorism forces, it’s not that the Chinese are going to come in tomorrow and backfill that. It’s really a misleading narrative to say that optimization is causing us to walk away from Africa.”
A second tranche of cuts — part of an overall 10-percent reduction slated to take place by late 2021 — might not even happen, he suggested.
“Whether that’ll ever happen or not, I don’t know,” he said.
“Each of these decisions to adjust force posture will be taken one at a time.”
Pentagon officials announced in November they would cut about 10 percent of the roughly 7,200 Defense Department personnel currently assigned to Africa Command, as the United States to seeks to shift its strategic focus from counterterrorism to countering competitors like China and Russia…