The U.S. is setting up new drone bases in western Africa after a coup in Niger limited operations there. As well: “The effort to build up American forces in the coastal states” of Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin “suggests Washington believes Mali and Burkina Faso are so inundated with Islamist militants that they are beyond the reach of Western help,” reports the Wall Street Journal, which notes that Africa has become “the global epicenter of Islamist violence.” More, here.
The U.S. Army is amping up its airborne recon fleet to serve longer-ranged missiles and evade ever-more-sophisticated air defenses. On Wednesday, officials announced a contract to buy a Bombadier Global 6500 large-cabin business jet, its first purchase of an aircraft to support the three-year-old High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, effort.
New era: The Global 6500 and the jets that are sure to follow will replace the slower and lower-flying turboprops that have long handled the Army’s aerial reconnaissance. Sam Skove has more, here.
Developing: Osprey black box found. Crews have found the flight recorder from the U.S. Air Force CV-22 that crashed Nov. 29 off Japan. The service’s fleet of Ospreys remains grounded, and the search continues for the body of the eighth airman aboard, an Air Force Special Operations Command spokesperson said. Audrey Decker has a bit more, here.
Want to buy a ghost ship? The U.S. Navy is auctioning off Nomad, a 175-foot-long, aluminum-hulled offshore support vessel that has been used since the late 2010s to test concepts and gear for large uncrewed surface vessels, The Drive reports.
And lastly today: We say goodbye to former U.S. Army chief Gordon Sullivan, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 86.
Sullivan entered service after college in 1959, and stayed for 36 years until his retirement as the Army’s 32nd chief of staff in 1995. Three years later, he became the president of the Association of the United States Army—where he would remain until 2016, when Defense One interviewed Sullivan ahead of his departure.
As Army chief under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Sullivan oversaw a post-Cold War drawdown that slashed the force from 770,000 active duty soldiers to just over half a million. By 2016, after a decade and a half of fighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sullivan was especially worried about the toll of repeated deployments on families of service members.
“We’ve got an Army that is under-resourced, over-committed,” he told Defense One at the time. “But clearly the Army needs modernization and it needs dollars,” he said. “And I worry that in some cases, we are presuming a level of risk at the front end where we are using Army forces, that if we’re not careful, we’ll wind up with an Army which can’t react when we need it to if something really happens.” Read more about Sullivan’s life and legacy from AUSA, here.
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