NEWS TRANSCRIPTS from the United States Department of Defense
Presenter: Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry
June 22, 2007 11:00 AM EDT
Principal Deputy Under Secretary Henry Briefing at the State Department Foreign Press Center
(Excerpt:) And so what AFRICOM represents is a realignment of our organizational construct on how we deal with Africa. And so instead of having three commanders that deal with Africa as a third or fourth priority, we will have a single commander that deals with it day in and day out as his first and only priority. So that is the main reason for the stand-up of AFRICOM.
AFRICOM is a unified command, it is a headquarters, and it involves a staff. There are not troops associated with that. There will be, as currently planned, no new troops to be stationed on the continent, and there will be no new bases associated with AFRICOM. There will be a headquarters associated with it, where the staff will work out of. In this day of information technology, just as this conference, I understand, is at multiple different sites, we believe that we can do that in a distributed nature. And so there in probability will not be a single headquarters, but we will look for more of a distributed approach as where the staff is located, and that will be both on the continent and off the continent. But the commander himself will be on the continent so he can better deal with his peers, chiefs of defense staff and members of multinational organization on the continent.
As we go to stand up AFRICOM, we in the Department of Defense, working with other parts of the U.S. government, realize that this was a rare opportunity to approach the command differently. And so the announcement has been made that the deputy for the command will not be a military officer, as is the practice in every other command that we have and every other nation that we know of, but the deputy will be a senior civilian from the State Department so that we can integrate with the diplomatic aspects.
Full transcript at:
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3999
