U.S. to build drone base in Niger

groups in the region.

The New York Times reports that initially, the drones flying from the base will conduct unarmed surveillance missions, but there is little doubt that if targets present themselves, these drones will be equipped with missiles and go on hunting-killing missions.

The base will be located in north Niger, east of Mali, and the Times reports that the Africa Command is also discussing options for building the base in Burkina Faso.

“This [the building of the drone base] is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom a more enduring presence for I.S.R.[intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance],” one American military official told the Times on Sunday.

France and the United States are worried that although the French campaign in Mali has so far gone very well – on Sunday and Monday, French forces had captured two of the main towns in north Mali, Gao and Timbuktu – tougher days are ahead, as Islamist fighters, and large quantities of weapons, keep flowing into north Mali from Libya.

The United States has only one permanent military base in Africa — in Djibouti on the Red Sea, more than 3,000 miles to the east of Mali.

Yesterday, Monday, the United States and Niger signed a status-of-forces agreement which provides legal protection to American troops in the country, including troops who may deploy to a new drone base.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, visited Niger this month to work on the details of the expanding security cooperation between the two countries. He decline to comment on the drone base, telling the Times in an e-mail that that the topic was “too operational for me to confirm or deny.”

The United States has been trying to collect more information on the Islamists in the Sahel for a while now. The U.S. military has flown surveillance missions over Mali from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, using turboprop planes disguised as commercial planes, but with only limited success.

General Ham, who will be retiring in the spring after forty years of service, said in an interview during his visit to Niger that his command, and U.S. intelligence, have faced great difficulties collecting consistent, reliable intelligence about what was going on in northern Mali and the rest of the Sahel.

“It’s tough to penetrate,” he told the Times. “It’s tough to get access for platforms that can collect. It’s an extraordinarily tough environment for human intelligence, not just ours but the neighboring countries as well.”

General Ham said that without more, and better, intelligence, it will be difficult to monitor the growing Islamist threat in the region. “Without operating locations on the continent, I.S.R. capabilities would be curtailed, potentially endangering U.S. security,” General Ham said in a statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee last March. “Given the vast geographic space and diversity in threats, the command requires increased ISR assets to adequately address the security challenges on the continent.”