It looks like Admiral Fallon just resigned.
His deputy will be the acting CENTCOM commander. Lt Gen Dempsey was in command of 1st Armored Division when I was working over in that neck of the woods. He helped me get some medals pushed through for my Airmen that had gotten downgraded by (ironically) CENTCOM (actually the air component). I thought that was pretty cool of him!
The US Department of Defense plans to stand up a new Africa Command. I’m guessing the Air Force component will be Air Force Africa Command (AFAFCOM). This also means a number of new General Officer positions will be opening up. There is no word I’ve seen as to whether these will be new billets, or whether there will be some personnel end-strength gymnastics in order to make four-stars out of current authorizations elsewhere in the military. There will be a four-star unified combatant commander, and probably a four-star service commander, what the Air Force calls a Major Command (MAJCOM) commander; the Army has a similar construct which seems to always be double-billed as a unified Army commander (for example, Gen McKiernan is currently commander of US Army Europe and also commander, Seventh US Army).
This is a larger effort than the USAF standing up its new Cyber Command, which will be dedicated to information warfare. The current plan appears to have 8th Air Force transform into a cyber warfighting organization. The aim appears to be to have Cyber Command eventually be a MAJCOM unto itself.
It’s kind of exciting to see a peek at what’s around the block, but frankly, the peek is all the excitement I think I’m going to get. I’m just going to kick back and enjoy flying the worlds’ greatest legacy fourth generation fighter jet!
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23 Feb 2007 Update: The Combatant Command will be AFRICOM. There is a transition team at HQ EUCOM in Stuttgart, Germany that will determine whether USAFE will continue to play a role in AFRICOM as well as EUCOM, or whether a separate MAJCOM will be needed.
Sometimes I find that I miss the Cold War. The Soviet Union was an evil, intractable adversary. The stakes on every confrontation were high. That all ended starting in the mid- to late-80s, with Solidarity in Poland, Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the 1991 coup by Dmitri Yazov, et al, the rise of Boris Yeltsin in that near-conflagration, and finally with the political collapse of the USSR itself. The days of The Hunt for Red October were gone and the nature of most of 007′s adversaries had to change in what now seems like a brief instant.
Then I come across things like this. The more some things change, the more they stay the same. Just on different levels.
On the other hand, I’m enjoying this hyperpower gig. We can broadcast to the bad guys exactly what we’re going to do to them, and they can’t stop us. It’s rather unbelievable sometimes that so many rogue countries even bother to try.