Air Force Component Of AFRICOM Activates

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
European Stars and Stripes
September 19, 2008
By Matt Millham, Stars and Stripes
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — With the gray hulk of a C-130 transport plane as a backdrop, Seventeenth Air Force — the Air Force component of the newly established U.S. Africa Command — activated Thursday in a cavernous hangar a continent away from where its efforts are aimed.
Location aside, the backdrop might have been considered somewhat out of place. At the unit’s zenith in Germany more than five decades ago, the Seventeenth Air Force had roughly 36,000 personnel and an inventory of some 650 tactical and support aircraft.
But by Oct. 1, 2009 — the day the unit is slated to be fully operational — it will have 286 personnel and no aircraft.
Nevertheless, the unit’s new commander, Maj. Gen. Ronald R. Ladnier, says he will have what he needs to get his job done. The mission is far different than that undertaken by the unit’s Cold War variant, which activated the first time in 1953 at Rabat, Morocco, to meet the Air Force’s expanded responsibilities under NATO.
"We want to help Africans help themselves," Ladnier said in remarks during the ceremony, which marked both the unit’s reactivation and his assumption of command. Not that the U.S. hasn’t been doing that for decades, he said.
"It’s not like we woke up and said, ‘hey, there’s this continent,’ " he said. "We have been and we are already engaged in Africa. But here’s the problem: Pacific Command has a piece; Central Command has a piece; European Command has a piece," as do nongovernmental organizations and the State Department.
"What we did was wake up and say, ‘hey, since you’re already there and we’re already there, why don’t we work together,’ " he said. "That’s what AFRICOM is about."
The role of Seventeenth Air Force — or Air Forces Africa — is to coordinate a variety of Air Force assets, such as aircraft and personnel, to support AFRICOM’s missions on the continent. Its small staff, he insists, won’t be a problem.
"It’s an archaic notion that you have to own everything and that it has to be standing there — that person has to be standing next to you ready to go," Ladnier said in an interview after the ceremony. The Ninth Air Force, the Air Force component of U.S. Central Command, operates in a similar fashion, arranging for aircraft and personnel to support Air Force operations in the Middle East without actually owning the personnel or planes.
 
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