Toward a Headquarters for Africom

On 6 February 2007, the President of the United States (POTUS) "decided to stand-up a new unified, combatant command, Africa Command (AFRICOM). The purpose of AFRICOM is "to oversee security cooperation, [build] partnership capability, [provide] defense support to non-military missions, and, if directed, [conduct] military operations on the African continent." The current plan is to establish the command's headquarters and elements of the staff headquarters/regional integration teams (subheadquarters) around the continent. Selecting these locations will be one of the more difficult decisions ahead-the success or failure of AFRICOM hinges, in part, on its location. The purpose of this paper is to assist the POTUS and others select the optimal locations for AFRICOM headquarters and sub-headquarters. To this end, this paper develops and applies site selection criteria to assist in selecting the optimal locations. Ideally, it would have been preferable to make an independent assessment by traveling to each respective state however practical limitations of time and resources made it necessary to rely on the research and efforts of others. In this vein, the vast majority of the technical research and qualitative assessments used to support this paper's conclusions and recommendations were derived from outside sources. Having applied such research and qualitative assessments to my site selection criteria, one is firmly convinced that mission success requires locating AFRICOM's headquarters in Botswana (Southern Africa region) and the sub-headquarters in Senegal (Western Africa region), Mali (Northern Africa region), Djibouti (Eastern Africa region), and So Tom and Prncipe (Central Africa region).