The Washington Post published an eye-opening report on the United States’ rapidly expanding network of secret drone bases in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and even the Indian Ocean:
The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.
One of the installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.
The tiny Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles is being used for a drone base under the new U.S. Africa Command. Wikileaks released diplomatic cables indicating that the U.S. plans to arm the drones and that U.S. negotiators as well as president of the Seychelles wanted such discussions to be secret:
The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate the efforts the United States is making to broaden the range of its drone weapons.
The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September 2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones’ presence but have said that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia, about 800 miles to the northwest.
The cables, obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, reveal that U.S. officials asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism missions secret. The Reapers are described by the military as “hunter-killer” drones because they can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs.
To allay concerns among islanders, U.S. officials said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the mission was announced two years ago. The cables show, however, that U.S. officials were thinking about weaponizing the drones.
During a meeting with Seychelles President James Michel on Sept. 18, 2009, American diplomats said the U.S. government “would seek discrete [sic], specific discussions . . . to gain approval” to arm the Reapers “should the desire to do so ever arise,” according to a cable summarizing the meeting. Michel concurred, but asked U.S. officials to approach him exclusively for permission “and not anyone else” in his government, the cable reported.
Michel’s chief deputy told a U.S. diplomat on a separate occasion that the Seychelles president “was not philosophically against” arming the drones, according to another cable. But the deputy urged the Americans “to be extremely careful in raising the issue with anyone in the Government outside of the President. Such a request would be ‘politically extremely sensitive’ and would have to be handled with ‘the utmost discreet care.’ ”
A U.S. military spokesman declined to say whether the Reapers in the Seychelles have ever been armed.
“Because of operational security concerns, I can’t get into specifics,” said Lt. Cmdr. James D. Stockman, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the base in the Seychelles. He noted, however, that the MQ-9 Reapers “can be configured for both surveillance and strike.”
We might expect to see more of these kinds of secret drone bases in the future given the immense cost of maintaining a network of 1000 foreign military bases and rising calls to cut these foreign bases:
In a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, there was evidence of rising support for closing American overseas military bases and bringing the soldiers home.
The September 13 hearing was called to consider the nomination of Ashton Carter to be Deputy Secretary of Defense, the number two position, replacing Bill Lynn.
Many of the Senators present used the occasion to criticize the “disaster” ahead for the Pentagon and U.S. security if the Pentagon budget is forced to swallow deep budget cuts.
But in little noticed asides, a liberal Democrat, a moderate Democrat and a conservative Republican all called for closing overseas bases.
Chairman Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, led off the chorus of the skeptics. Levin argued
“Now, given the budget pressures under which the department’s going to be operating, one of the things that some of us believe we have to do is to take a look at the stationing and restationing of and the location of our military forces overseas where we’ve got large number of bases, and to consider both relocation and the restationing possibly of some of those military forces from overseas bases back to the United States. Is that on the table [to be considered as a reduction]?”
Ash Carter agreeably agreed that the issue was a potential candidate for cuts without committing to anything: “On the table.”
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