Reading Nick Turse's new book, Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, raises
the question of whether black lives in Africa matter to the U.S.
military any more than black lives in the United States matter to the
police lately trained and armed by that military.
Turse scouts out the still little told tale of U.S. military
expansion into Africa over the past 14 years, and primarily over the
past 6 years. Five to eight thousand U.S. troops plus mercenaries are
training, arming, and fighting alongside and against African militaries
and rebel groups in nearly every nation in Africa. Major land and water
routes to bring in the U.S. armaments, and all the accouterments of
bases housing U.S. troops, have been established to avoid the local
suspicions created by building and improving airports. And yet, the U.S.
military has proceeded to acquire local agreements to make use of 29
international airports and gotten to work building and improving runways
at a number of them.
