6th Fleet Focus: African Partnership Station Ends

The Africa Partnership Station to the Gulf of Guinea concluded this week, according to yesterday's press announcement. It has been a long time since the American people can point to a military supported operation in Africa with a lot of pride, but only someone who hates Africa and the people there could conclude the African Partnership Station is a bad idea.

Most Americans have no doubt heard that there is a need for inter service cooperation and inter agency cooperation that factors in the private sector. If you are looking for that model supported from the sea, the Global Fleet Station is it, and the African Partnership Station was the realization of the successful implementation of that model for Africa.

Today's press announcement summarizes some of the data of the deployment, we like this summery best.

Over the course of seven months, APS has visited 19 ports of call in 10 countries and trained over 1500 maritime professionals in skills ranging from small boat handling, port security, and martial arts to non-commissioned officer leadership, damage control, and maritime law.

“We have been working with our partners in many European countries. The French have been down here with a number of ships and we have been working very closely with them,” said Rear Adm. Anthony M. Kurta, U.S. Naval Forces Europe. “The staff of APS has also been very international in nature; we’ve had representatives from Portugal, France, Germany, and England as well as many staff members from our African partners as well.”

Additionally, APS worked with non-governmental organizations such as Project Handclasp, USAID, and Project Hope to bring relief and aid to many people in need. With the help of APS, Project Hope was able to donate five hundred thousand high nutritional meals, twenty-five pallets of medical, hygiene and educational supplies along with hospital beds and medical equipment valued at over one hundred thousand dollars.

Even those very interested in the US Navy probably had no idea France has been involved the whole time, and while they call their deployment to the Gulf of Guinea something else, the FS Tonnerre (L9014) has been down there almost the entire time supporting a similar mission profile as the USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) and HSV-2 Swift. That is a pretty big platform for France to commit to a Global Fleet Station mission. In truth though, they've done that mission with similar platforms to that region in the past, the only difference was this year they increased the scale of their operation to match the US commitment.

There were two major events of the African Partnership Station that will require additional study to further the concept. The first was the humanitarian crisis that broke out in Chad, of which few may realize the African Partnership Station got involved. We'll let the press release tell the story.

”As we started lap two, we had the unrest in Chad where a number of refugees came over the Cameroonian border. The U.S. ambassador in Cameroon and the leadership there were familiar with APS,” said Capt. John Nowell, Commander Africa Partnership Station. “They were familiar with some of the items we had onboard including some high nutrition meals. They were familiar with our flexibility and so they asked if we could accelerate getting Swift there. Then we used the relationships we had with organizations like USAID and Catholic Relief Services as well as local organizations to facilitate getting those products off the ship and to the right place for use in the refugee operation.”

Note, the non government agency partnerships the mission had developed allowed for rapid response with the right product. Very nice. NGOs really do know best, their integration into the proactive humanitarian approaches represents an ideal way in our opinion for the Navy to conduct humanitarian operations as offensive tactic in peacetime. In that way the services don't have to recreate the process, rather enhance the one in place with what the military already does best: logistics.

The other operation was the Sea Basing operation we highlighted extensively. That operation barely got any press coverage, sad. Probably one of the most important focused proactive humanitarian operations in our nations history considering how much humanitarian supply materials was moved, not to mention an important test of Sea Basing, and almost no one in the country heard about it. Without question, and I'll debate this with anyone, the Sea Base operation off Liberia is the most important US Navy story so far in 2008, and that includes the satellite shoot down in the Pacific that everyone wanted to talk about.

It is this moment, after a successful deployment to Africa that many Americans don't really understand, where Admiral Ulrich's retirement is evident. This was the moment he was at his best. There should be a blogger roundtable on this topic on Thursday, not to discuss the topic with people like you and me, rather to educate the political bloggers who claim care about Africa and humanitarian missions regarding what the Navy just did.