STUTTGART, Germany — U.S. forces are preparing to deploy in June to northern Africa for military exercises designed to help make the countries more stable and secure.

About 1,000 Special Operations troops, mostly from Europe, will be working for three weeks with troops from the African countries. The goals, like those of American trainers in Iraq, are to improve the professionalism of local troops and thus the legitimacy of their governments.

“This is just the start of decades worth of work in Africa,” said Army Maj. John Silkman, a long-range planner with U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, which is leading the exercise. “We can’t wait for a clear and present danger to arise to engage there.”

There will be two parts to June’s exercise, which is called Flintlock 05.

One will place 12-man Operational Detachments-Alpha, or ODAs, and other forces with specially selected troops from seven African nations. They will train on war-fighting skills such as combat-lifesaver training, marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat.

The U.S. forces will also perform medical missions and scout the region for future civil-affairs projects.

The second part will be a four-day command post exercise to be performed in Dakar, Senegal. Troops from the seven nations will be thrown into a crisis to solve. In addition to Senegal, the participating nations are Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria and Tunisia.  (Ed. Note: What about  Darfur..it is already a crisis..eds.)

“It’s to show them how to coordinate, so they can have some kind of protocol for working together in the future,” Silkman said. “They should be working to solve regional problems collaboratively rather than separately.

“It’s preventative in nature. We would like the region to not become like what you see in the Middle East.” (Ed. Note: from the same man that said earlier :  “We can’t wait for a clear and present danger to arise to engage there.”)

Much of the exercise is to help make the countries’ borders more secure. Because of their isolation, the borders can be sanctuaries for people who smuggle fugitives, weapons, drugs, money and influence, according to Maj. Darin Conkright, an exercise planner for the Special Operations Command.

“A lot of the border regions are pretty desolated,” Conkright said. “If I were a bad guy, I’d want to hang out on the borders.”

The exercise is one of several efforts by the U.S. military in recent years directed toward the African continent. Among them:

• In December, the U.S. European Command hosted the second Africa Clearinghouse conference, where officers from Europe, Canada and the United States shared their upcoming plans for military and humanitarian efforts in Africa, in order to work together and avoid duplication.
• Last summer, Army Special Forces soldiers and Marines trained security forces in Chad and Niger. The U.S. Air Force in October airlifted African Union troops and supplies into the troubled Darfur region of Sudan.
• Troops from all service branches are now based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, on the eastern Horn of Africa, to patrol the Red Sea and perform humanitarian missions.

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