The Pentagon has quietly built roughly a dozen African air bases since 2007

Evidence

While the command’s secrecy makes getting a full picture difficult, evidence suggests that Africom’s on-the-ground expansion has been rapid and broad. A 2014 article in the U.S. Army’s magazine Army Sustainment identified nine forward operating locations in the Horn of Africa alone. Likewise, a series of Washington Post reports have shown that since 2007, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” in countries including Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, and the Seychelles for drones and surveillance operations over Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 994

Categorization

• SEED: The gap between Africom’s public claims (Camp Lemonnier as ‘only’ base) and Washington Post-documented air bases is a sharp angle on the secrecy-versus-reality mismatch.