A WaPo article in yesterday’s paper examines a CRS report on AFRICOM and offers some excellent illustrations of how this new COCOM reflects the accelerating shift away from major combat operations.

At a briefing last month after a trip to six African countries, Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters: “We discussed different mission areas . . . emphasizing the humanitarian, the building partnership capability, [and] civil affairs aspects.” He said he discussed working “with the host nations to improve their capacity to exercise sovereignty over any ungoverned spaces” where terrorists could establish training bases.

…Fear that it could represent a first step toward more U.S. troops in Africa led Henry to assure African leaders that the “principal mission will be in the area of security cooperation and building partnership capability. It will not be in warfighting.”

In many ways, then, AFRICOM could well be the first COCOM to implement the priorities of DoD 3000 to such a degree that the majority of its resources will be devoted to non-major combat operations.

Of course, demonstrating this to others will be a challenge, which motivates making a large percentage of the command non-military:

…a State Department civilian official is to be one of the two deputy commanders of AFRICOM, though that official would not be in the chain of command on military operations, according to the CRS report. In addition, more than one-third of AFRICOM headquarters personnel would be from outside the Pentagon. Defense officials told CRS that “the new command will seek greater interagency coordination with the State Department, USAID and other government agencies,” according to the report.

Ultimately, the issues of how to align DoD economic assistance with USAID and DoS efforts will lead to such capabilities being moved out of DoD, but this will not happen until the capability has grown further and there is a more general understanding of its importance.