US Africa Command Faces Operational Reckoning as Threats Multiply Across Continent

United States Africa Command has published six theater strategies since its establishment in 2007, each one a direct response to shifting military leadership, presidential administrations, and a changing global landscape. The most recent update came in 2024. The next revision will need to reckon with a continent under simultaneous pressure from terrorist expansion, great-power competition, and structural fragility that no single instrument of US policy can address alone.

Theater strategies of this kind function as the de facto military strategy for a geographic region, explaining how US military forces will achieve national and defense policy goals while accounting for interagency interests across the Departments of Defense, State, and Commerce, the former US Agency for International Development, law enforcement agencies, and the intelligence community. Getting that document right matters operationally.

The threat picture is stark. Terrorist organizations have made Africa the global center of gravity for extremist activity, according to General Dagvin Anderson, the USAFRICOM commander, in his 2025 confirmation responses. Islamic State affiliates and al-Qaeda branches continue to expand across West and East Africa, creating conditions where these organizations could establish safe havens from which to organize operations threatening the US homeland and American interests abroad.

Meanwhile, US strategic competitors are deepening their footprint. China has expanded investments, trade, and military engagements, pursuing critical minerals access, port development, and security ventures. A recent military exercise conducted by China, Russia, and Iran off the coast of South Africa illustrated the coordinated nature of that challenge to US access, presence, and influence. Russia continues to undermine African stability through misinformation campaigns, support to regional conflicts, and supply of war materials. Ongoing instability tied to the Iran conflict threatens to generate economic disruption across African nations and shift sentiment away from the United States.

Structural vulnerabilities compound these pressures. Weak governance, civil-military divisions, and absent civil infrastructure create openings for violent extremist organizations to recruit and expand. The continent’s rapidly growing youth population faces severe unemployment in unstable regions, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2024 assessment, producing recruitment pools that extremist groups actively exploit. The Fragile States Index for 2024 identifies six of the ten most fragile nations globally as African, with thirty-one of the next fifty also on the continent.

Specific countries illustrate the operational stakes. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and third largest economy, faces escalating security instability that could destabilize West Africa more broadly. Libya’s fragile reunification process requires sustained attention to prevent spillover across the Maghreb and Mediterranean. Somalia’s security trajectory and the potential for renewed conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea pose direct risks to East African regional stability. These are not abstract concerns; they are the conditions USAFRICOM forces and partners operate within.

An updated theater strategy should pursue three primary ends: ensuring lasting relationships and access in critical African regions through enduring, mutually beneficial partnerships; collaboratively securing the homeland for each invested nation, with emphasis on safety and security for African partners, allies, and the United States; and developing African defense institutions with improved capability and capacity to lead on national and regional security.

The strategic ways to achieve those ends rest on three pillars. Shaping the environment involves securing and reinforcing access, building partner capacity, and setting the theater for contingency operations, combining soft and hard power capabilities centered on engagement and influence. Deterring threats requires preventing malign state and non-state actors from exploiting instability, operating at both geo-strategic and localized scales while empowering African partners to disrupt and defeat violent extremist organizations. Supporting stabilization means securing international interagency activities that help Africans experience capable civil governance, sustainable economies, and the rule of law.

The means available are both tangible and intangible. Intangible assets include inter- and intra-governmental processes, relationships across boundaries, US cultural appeal, and goodwill among governments. The United States possesses unique convening authority to bring together stakeholders around shared interests, particularly valuable in shaping the environment through defense diplomacy. Tangible means comprise US military forces, equipment, authorities, funding, security cooperation programs, National Guard state partnerships, lines of communication, and limited basing across Africa.

The underlying theory of change is direct: if internationally invested nations work together to combat opportunism in Africa and prioritize stabilization through engagement, prevention, and empowerment, African nations can better chart their own course toward security and stability. That logic reinforces USAFRICOM’s existing operational priorities of regaining access, sustaining pressure, and increasing burden sharing among partners.

Whether the command can translate that framework into a coherent, executable strategy before the threat environment shifts again is the question the next document will have to answer.