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Reps question military role in Africa Command

Lawmakers grilled the military leaders of Africa Command on Capitol Hill today questioning if the Defense Department was living up to its promise to integrate interagency civilians into the organization.

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security and foreign affairs — which held the hearing — said he wasn’t even sure if Africa Command should be led by the military considering how few traditional military missions exist.

“I’m just not comfortable that the military is the one leading all these civilian agencies,” Tierney said.

Less that 80 days before Africa Command officially stands up Oct. 1, John Pendleton, director of force structure and defense planning at the Government Accountability Office, criticized how few interagency positions are projected to man headquarters.

One percent or 13 out of the 993 people working at Africa Command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, on Sept. 30, 2008, are due to be interagency civilians, according to statistics presented at the hearing. Another 622 (63 percent) will be military jobs; 358 (36 percent) are due to be DoD civilians.

Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, Africa Command chief of staff, responded by asking lawmakers to give the command a chance to stand up and “prove through their actions” how its mix of military and interagency civilians will prove effective and win over a continent wary of the command’s creation.

Mary Yates, Africa Command’s deputy for civil-military activities, said while the command’s headquarters won’t have many civilians on staff at first, it will have high ranking interagency members like herself, who is the first and only civilian to be a deputy at a combatant command.