US troops now in Uganda

[just Warren]

Only to assist and advise of course.

I wonder when, if ever, this will end and how large the operation will be in a five years time. What's that phrase for when missions start small and then in time get bigger by sort of just creeping along?

How many active combat operations either directly or in support are US troops involved in right now? Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda, Libya, Somalia? Yemen?

[wmenorr67]

Only to assist and advise of course.

I wonder when, if ever, this will end and how large the operation will be in a five years time. What's that phrase for when missions start small and then in time get bigger by sort of just creeping along?

How many active combat operations either directly or in support are US troops involved in right now? Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda, Libya, Somalia? Yemen?

You really don't want to know the answer to that question.

[SADShooter]

You said it. Mission creep. The one thing comparably risky to a land war in Asia, as we've learned, is an advisory/humanitarian operation in Africa.

We shall see.

[HankB]

Democrat Presidents have had a soft spot (or is it a blind eye?) for Uganda for a long time.

When Jimmy Carter decided the US would go along with the UN and, in the name of human rights, stop buying Rhodesian chrome, he was perfectly content to allow US coffee companies to import coffee from Uganda, then under Idi Amin, an admitted cannibal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that eating someone is a rather serious affront to human rights.

Now BHO is sending advisors because some bad guys are causing trouble . . . somehow, that being Uganda, I think identifying bad guys would be like trying to choose between the Crips and the Bloods.

[Jamie B]

Hank speaks wise words.

I know that there are very bad situations happening all over the world these days.

Until we actually get our own *expletive deleted*it together, though, we need to stay out of all this other crappola.

I still remember getting our heads handed to us by NVA and in Mogadishu.....

[longeyes]

We have a national security problem.

But it's not in Uganda.  it's a dictatorial President who has an agenda all his own.

[never_retreat]

Unless Uganda has all the listed below they are not a threat.
Functional standing arm
Air force
Navy
Intelligence Dept

[wmenorr67]

Unless Uganda has all the listed below they are not a threat.
Functional standing arm
Air force
Navy
Intelligence Dept

Alqaeda doesn't have all that and they are a threat.

[Ben]

Interestingly, the local uber-liberal rag had a story on this today. The same paper that hates "Bush's Wars" and thinks war is evil, is today full of bloodlust hoping Obama's military team kills Kony.

[kgbsquirrel]

Unless Uganda has all the listed below they are not a threat.
Functional standing arm
Air force
Navy
Intelligence Dept

I think I'd add the following:

and/or credible intercontinental-ranged strategic rocket force.

(Which out of the 195 DOS recognized countries currently in the world, is limited only to the USA, Russia, GB, France, and PRC, despite the DPRK's best efforts to make the list.)

[Jamisjockey]

Unless Uganda has all the listed below they are not a threat.
Functional standing arm
Air force
Navy
Intelligence Dept

You forgot the "and has attacked us" part.

[kgbsquirrel]

Alqaeda doesn't have all that and they are a threat.

Distinction between State and non-State actors coupled with a difference in warfare doctrine.

[wmenorr67]

Distinction between State and non-State actors coupled with a difference in warfare doctrine.

Ok then Iran.

[kgbsquirrel]

Ok then Iran.

Alrighty then, lets see what I can cook up with my aging knowledge.

Warfare Doctrine: Primarily classified as maneuver but still heavily reliant on attrition.

Army
Threat against continental U.S.: Non-existent, lacking suitable long range deployment options (amphibious/air delivery)
Threat against local region: Vs. local regional forces, credible. Vs. visiting foreign forces, possible but limited.

Air force
Threat against continental U.S.: Non-existent, lacking suitable long range air-refueling and forward air field options.
Threat against local region: Vs. local regional forces, credible to limited depending on country. Vs. visiting foreign forces, limited to non-existent.

Navy
Threat against continental U.S.: Non-existent, lacking suitable long-range blue water vessels and forward port locations/underway replenishment.
Threat against sea targets in local region: Vs. unarmed civilian watercraft, credible. Vs. surface warships of regional powers, credible. Vs. surface warships of the U.S. and other major industrialized nations, possible but limited. Vs. modern submarines of the U.S. and other major industrialized nations, limited to non-existent.
Threat against land targets in local region: Shore targets, credible. In-land targets, very limited.

Strategic Rocket Force
Threat against continental U.S.: Non-existent, lacking suitable long-range delivery systems.
Threat against local region: Vs. local regional forces, credible to limited depending on target AA/ABM capabilities. Vs. visiting foreign forces, credible to limited depending on target AA/ABM capability. Payload capabilities: Confirmed conventional and chemical, unconfirmed nuclear. Assessment is for capability only and ignores strategic weapon deterrence policies.

Intelligence Dept
Threat against continental U.S.: Intelligence collection, credible. Covert operations, limited. Guerrilla warfare support, limited to non-existent.
Threat against local region: Intelligence collection, credible. Covert operations, credible. Guerrilla warfare support, credible.


Overall assessment:
Direct military operations threat against the United States - None.
Direct intelligence operations threat against the United States - Limited.
Direct military operations threat against regional powers - Credible.
Direct intelligence operations threat against regional powers - Credible.
Direct military operations threat against visiting foreign powers - Possible but Limited.
Direct intelligence operations threat against visiting foreign powers - Credible.


But this is just my personal 5-minute assessment, I'm sure there is an NIE floating around somewhere far more detailed and with possibly different conclusions.

[Jamisjockey]

Last I checked, Iran hasn't attacked us, our assets, or even our allies.  One assasination plot that was headed off.  And harsh words. 

[wmenorr67]

Last I checked, Iran hasn't attacked us, our assets, or even our allies.  One assasination plot that was headed off.  And harsh words. 

Maybe not directly.

[Perd Hapley]

You forgot the "and has attacked us" part.

Oh for crying out loud. You forgot the "and is not a sovereign nation" part. 

[MechAg94]

Hank speaks wise words.

I know that there are very bad situations happening all over the world these days.

Until we actually get our own *expletive deleted*it together, though, we need to stay out of all this other crappola.

I still remember getting our heads handed to us by NVA and in Mogadishu.....

I don't mean to change the thread, but did we really get our heads handed to us by the NVA?  It seems to me that was the SVA that got hammered after we left. 

Mogadishu is true and something that shouldn't have happened, and after the fact should have had an overwhelming response. 

[roo_ster]

Last I checked, Iran hasn't attacked us, our assets, or even our allies.  One assasination plot that was headed off.  And harsh words. 

What about the Rep Guardsmen captured & killed in Iraq?   How about all the arms they have poured into the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents?  How about Iranian support for Hamas and the same for Syria/Hezbolla?

Some awfully short and/or selective memories around here these days.


As for the OP, there is no conceivable US interest to be found in that cesspool of a country.

Once again, time for a reprise of Kim du Toit's "Let Africa Sink:"

Let Africa Sink
By: Kim du Toit
May 26, 2002 01:40pm

When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible. That disconnect is the way life is regarded in the West (it’s precious, must be protected at all costs etc.), compared to the way life, and death, are regarded in Africa. Let me try to quantify this statement.

In Africa, life is cheap. There are so many ways to die in Africa that death is far more commonplace than in the West. You can die from so many things--snakebite, insect bite, wild animal attack, disease, starvation, food poisoning… the list goes on and on. At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy (murder, assault, warfare and the rest), and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low--in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics (they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook). Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty.

I lived in Africa for over thirty years. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits--traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)

So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless it’s accidental, or it affects someone close to me. (Death which strikes at strangers, of course, is mostly ignored.) Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider "close", only about ten survive today--and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty.

Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof--not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida). One was bitten by a snake, and died from heart failure. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard. Two were shot by muggers. The last went out on his surfboard one day and was never seen again (did I mention that sharks are plentiful off the African coasts and in the major rivers?). My situation is not uncommon in South Africa--and north of the Limpopo River (the border with Zimbabwe), I suspect that others would show worse statistics.

The death toll wasn’t just confined to my friends. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease (and this was pre-AIDS Africa too) and in general, succumbing to some of Africa’s many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and you’ll begin to get the idea.

My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: "Three Headless Bodies Found".

The next day: "Three Heads Found".

The third day: "Heads Don’t Match Bodies".

You can’t make this stuff up.

As a result, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.

Yes, all this was also true in Europe--maybe a thousand years ago. But not any more. And Europe doesn’t teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on.

The Dutch controlled the floods. All of Europe controls famine--it’s non-existent now. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia), Europe since 1700 doesn’t even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether--rare in Europe, common in Africa.

More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual--none of which is true in Africa.

Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: "Africa wins again." This is usually said after an incident such as:

a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason

a tribal chief prefers to let his tribe starve to death rather than accepting food from the Red Cross (would mean he wasn’t all-powerful, you see)

an entire nation starves to death, while its ruler accumulates wealth in foreign banks

a new government comes into power, promising democracy, free elections etc., provided that the freedom doesn’t extend to the other tribe

the other tribe comes to power in a bloody coup, then promptly sets about slaughtering the first tribe

etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

The prognosis is bleak, because none of this mayhem shows any sign of ending. The conclusions are equally bleak, because, quite frankly, there is no answer to Africa’s problems, no solution that hasn’t been tried before, and failed.

Just go to the CIA World Fact Book, pick any of the African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi etc.), and compare the statistics to any Western country (eg. Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland). The disparities are appalling--and it’s going to get worse, not better. It has certainly gotten worse since 1960, when most African countries achieved independence. We, and by this I mean the West, have tried many ways to help Africa. All such attempts have failed.

1. Charity is no answer. Money simply gets appropriated by the first, or second, or third person to touch it (17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance).

2. Food isn’t distributed. This happens either because there is no transportation infrastructure (bad), or the local leader deliberately withholds the supplies to starve people into submission (worse).

3. Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of "foreign aid" has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldn’t support Pittsburgh.

Add to this, as I mentioned above, the endless cycle of Nature’s little bag of tricks--persistent drought followed by violent flooding, a plethora of animals, reptiles and insects so dangerous that life is already cheap before Man starts playing his little reindeer games with his fellow Man--and what you are left with is: catastrophe.

The inescapable conclusion is simply one of resignation. This goes against the grain of our humanity--we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem (smallpox, polio, whatever), and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine won’t work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, you’d have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations.

So that is the only one response, and it’s a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves.

It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, that’s just too damn bad. We have better things to do--sometimes, you just have to say, "Can’t do anything about it."

The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. The Western media shouldn’t even bother reporting on it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything--but everything has been tried before, and failed. Everything, of course, except self-reliance.

All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the U.S., because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several U.S. churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mistake. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time.

Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember "It Takes A Village"? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasn’t been tried before and failed, not one thing that isn’t a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.

So here’s my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area. There are two reasons why this isn’t going to happen.

Firstly, the PRC doesn’t have that kind of money to throw around; and secondly, the result of any communist assistance will be precisely the same as if it were Western assistance. For the record, Mozambique and Angola are both communist countries--and both are economic disaster areas. The prognosis for both countries is disastrous--and would be the same for any other African country.

Africa has to heal itself. The West can’t help it. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself.

Kim du Toit, May 26, 2002 at 01:40pm

[wmenorr67]

What I find interesting is the number of Ugandans that were hired by the private security firms to pull security on CF bases in Iraq.  Now there is going to be bunches of them unemployed.

[Blakenzy]

Well, clearly some Ugandans got word of our "freedom", and then proceeded to hate us for it. So naturally we have to send troops over there to show them what is what... so, you know, we can remain free. 

Advisory phase: 3mo-1yr.
Kinetic military action phase: 8 days
Counter insurgency, nation building phase: 5-15yr.
Complete withdrawal of US forces from country:  yeah right

[HankB]

. . . Direct military operations threat against regional powers - Credible . . .

Uganda's neighbors are Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda . . . calling them "regional powers" may not be much more than a courtesy upgrade of their actual status.

[Stetson]

Last I checked, Iran hasn't attacked us, our assets, or even our allies.  One assasination plot that was headed off.  And harsh words. 

And your current active clearance let's you find this out how?

[Jamisjockey]

 

[kgbsquirrel]

Uganda's neighbors are Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda . . . calling them "regional powers" may not be much more than a courtesy upgrade of their actual status.

That quick and dirty assessment Wmenorr67 asked about was for Iran, not Uganda.

As for Uganda, my knowledge ready at hand is pretty limited but it seems like the local rebel groups are pretty good at mass-murdering civilians and avoiding the local government troops.  

Generally speaking regarding non-State affiliated African rebel groups you're looking at a few hundred to maybe a few thousand in strength per faction (with some serious exceptions such as Somalia in '93), primarily equipped with small arms and technicals and employing as soldiers children as young as 10-12. Training and battlefield discipline is a joke. As long as proper tactics, equipment and trained soldiers are used the only real problem is locating them due to the guerrilla/asymmetric nature of their fighting body. Hell there was a group of private contractors, Executive Outcomes (mercenaries really, but I honestly don't see that as a bad thing, especially in cases like this,) working for the legitimate Sierra Leone government in the mid-'90's that was giving the RUF serious grief with a single Mi-24 Hind gunship, some light armor (BMP-2's for example) and a couple hundred ex-SADF/SAS/et al. augmented by some local government-aligned tribal fighting groups.