Contracts Before CombatRethinking American Strategy in Africa

For much of Washington, Africa becomes most visible when something has already gone wrong. A government falls, an insurgency expands, a terrorist organization establishes itself, Russian personnel appear, Chinese control over a strategic resource becomes apparent, an embassy is threatened, or American citizens need evacuation. Suddenly the questions reaching Washington concern basing rights, intelligence, overflight permission, special operations forces, airlift, naval support, and how quickly the United States can put military capability into the region.

Those are legitimate questions. They are often asked too late.

Africa is increasingly important to the United States not simply because it contains security problems, but because it contains resources, markets, and opportunities that will matter enormously over the coming decades. Critical minerals, energy, agriculture, telecommunications, transportation infrastructure, and a young and growing population are attracting competitors that understood the continent's importance well before much of Washington did.

Some outside powers and actors may also find opportunity in African disorder. Weak institutions, opaque resource agreements, illicit trade, and political instability can allow certain players to obtain resources or influence on terms that would be considerably more difficult in a transparent and functioning commercial environment. AFRICOM itself describes Russia's current approach in parts of Africa as exploiting instability while using security relationships to secure access to strategic resources.¹ That does not mean every American competitor wants instability, nor should every Chinese, Russian, European, Gulf, or other foreign investment be viewed through the same lens. It means simply that some actors can profit from conditions the United States should have no interest in reproducing.

The United States should not attempt to beat predatory actors at being predatory. It has far more to offer through legitimate finance, technology, engineering, energy, agriculture, industrial capacity, and access to markets. America's competitive advantage should be making money with Africa, not merely making money from Africa.

That requires changing the sequence in which Washington thinks about national power: contracts before combat; commerce space before battlespace.

This is not pacifism, nor is it an argument for dismantling AFRICOM, abandoning American security interests, or pretending that every conflict can be prevented by financing a power plant. Terrorist organizations, hostile states, civil wars, and circumstances in which military force becomes necessary will remain. The argument is simpler: economic power is also national power, and America should employ much more of it before conditions deteriorate to the point where military power becomes the remaining option.

There are encouraging signs that Washington is beginning to recognize the connection. AFRICOM's 2026 posture statement explicitly places economic engagement alongside military and diplomatic instruments and describes efforts to integrate economic considerations more closely into strategy.² The larger question, however, remains: instead of asking only how the United States should compete militarily in Africa, Washington should ask why so many competitions are allowed to reach the military stage in the first place.

Africa Is More Than a Battlespace

Look at a map of Africa through the eyes of a national-security planner and it is easy to see threats. There is instability across portions of the Sahel, terrorist organizations in East and West Africa, Russian involvement with governments and military regimes, expanding Chinese positions in mining and infrastructure, and political upheaval that can complicate American access.

Now look at the same map through the eyes of an industrialist and the picture changes. Africa contains enormous deposits of copper, cobalt, lithium, bauxite, manganese, uranium, gold, and other resources, but the opportunities extend well beyond mining. The continent also has substantial agricultural potential and enormous unmet demand for electrical generation and transmission, clean water, transportation infrastructure, telecommunications, construction equipment, refrigeration, and financial services.

The maps are identical. The difference is whether Washington sees commerce space or battlespace first.

China understood the strategic importance of economic infrastructure long ago. AFRICOM now identifies Beijing's investments in African mining, transportation, ports, and infrastructure as sources of strategic leverage.³ The appropriate American response, however, cannot simply be: China has mines, therefore America needs mines. That risks substituting one extractor for another.

The more important question is what economic system develops around the resource. If copper leaves a mine, enters a train, and proceeds directly to a ship bound for a foreign processing plant, the host country captures one kind of value. If the same transportation and power infrastructure also supports processing, manufacturing, agricultural shipments, local suppliers, and domestic commerce, the economic effect can become considerably larger.

This does not mean every mineral must be processed in Africa or every product manufactured there. Economics still matters, and some proposed projects will simply not be commercially viable. But American policymakers and financiers should at least ask a larger question: what additional economic activity becomes possible because this investment exists?

If America's answer to extractive competition is simply American extraction, Africans have little reason to regard the United States as a fundamentally different economic partner.

Ask What They Need

One of the easiest mistakes for a powerful country to make is arriving with an answer before asking the question. The United States has done enough of that.

Africa does not need another ideological crusade, nor does it need Washington attempting to recreate NATO on the continent. African countries already possess regional and continental institutions of their own. Nor should African governments have to conduct their relationships with the United States through former colonial powers. European states can remain important American allies and important African economic partners without serving as obligatory intermediaries between African capitals and Washington.

The opening question should be considerably more practical:

What is preventing legitimate economic activity here?

Sometimes the answer will have little to do with terrorism, governance, or geopolitics. The obstacle may instead be inadequate electricity, unreliable water supplies, poor transportation, limited access to credit, weak communications, insufficient refrigeration, a shortage of heavy equipment, or a workforce that has not yet received the necessary technical training. None of these problems sounds as dramatic as an insurgency or a great-power confrontation, but that is precisely the point. Addressing ordinary economic constraints early may help prevent them from contributing to the extraordinary political and security problems that command Washington's attention later.

Mali and the Cost of Not Having Power

Mali offers a useful example. The country possesses substantial natural resources and has attracted commercial interest for decades, yet identifying an opportunity on a geological map is not the same thing as making that opportunity investable. Serious industrial development also requires electricity, transportation, communications, water, and access to equipment. Without those things, commercially attractive resources can remain partly stranded.

Mali's electricity problems demonstrate the effect. The IMF reports that widespread rolling outages have forced companies and households toward expensive onsite generation and estimates—with appropriate caution about the uncertainty involved—that outages of 10 to 16 hours per day, as experienced in 2024, could reduce annual GDP growth by approximately 0.5 to 0.8 percentage points.⁴

Consider what that means strategically. Washington can look at a struggling country such as Mali and ask what American military capabilities might someday be required if instability grows. Or, years earlier, it can ask why legitimate businesses are not investing. If part of the answer is electricity, then electricity has become more than a development issue. It is part of the strategic environment.

The United States does not necessarily need to build the generating station itself. It may instead need to help make a commercially sensible transaction possible. America already possesses financial machinery for precisely this kind of activity. The Export-Import Bank provides loans, guarantees, and insurance supporting overseas purchases of American goods and services and reports supporting $13.5 billion in transactions in sub-Saharan Africa between 2010 and 2023.⁵

The instruments therefore exist. What is often missing is the strategic habit of asking whether they can be employed before the security problem matures.

Nor does this require writing blank checks to governments. Wherever practical, American participation should be structured around identifiable projects and transactions, commercially defensible financing, private participation, transparent procurement, auditing, and measurable performance. Where public credit is exposed, Washington should retain appropriate oversight.

Finance the project, not the patronage network.

Commerce Space

There is an important point that should not become obscured by the language of development: America should make money.

American companies should sell turbines, pumps, excavators, telecommunications equipment, agricultural machinery, and other products for which African customers have legitimate demand. American engineering companies should compete for contracts, investors should earn returns where those returns justify the risks, American workers should receive orders, and American industry should gain more diversified access to strategic resources and growing markets.

This is not philanthropy. It is commerce.

EXIM already illustrates part of the concept: its mission is to support American employment by financing exports of American goods and services to international markets.⁵ The opportunity is to think more strategically about where such transactions can simultaneously advance American commercial and national-security interests.

Successful commercial strategy must also look beyond the first transaction. A generating plant is not valuable only because someone sells a turbine. The electricity it produces may make a processing plant commercially viable, which in turn creates demand for transportation, warehousing, maintenance, and additional suppliers. Workers earning wages create new consumer demand, while more dependable electricity makes still other investments possible. In this way, the original transaction begins creating customers and opportunities that nobody in Washington needed to plan in advance.

This is where infrastructure becomes strategically interesting. A railway should not be judged solely by how efficiently it moves copper from a mine to a port; policymakers should also ask whether it can support agricultural producers, manufacturers, and other commercial users. The same question applies to electricity, water, telecommunications, ports, and roads. The objective is not for government to choose every business that will follow, but to identify and remove bottlenecks that prevent private enterprise from discovering opportunities for itself.

Remove the bottleneck and let entrepreneurs discover the opportunity.

The United States does not need to promise that it will develop African countries for them. It can offer something more credible: access to American capital, equipment, technology, expertise, and markets where American and African interests overlap.

The strongest commercial relationship is one in which both sides are making money, because then both sides have something to lose.

AFRICOM Belongs at the Table—But Not at the Head of It

Contracts Before Combat does not mean excluding the military from the conversation. AFRICOM understands political instability, transportation vulnerabilities, regional security relationships, evacuation requirements, overflight restrictions, logistical constraints, and the consequences of geography in ways that a commercial lender may not. Those insights belong in American strategic planning.

AFRICOM should not, however, become America's development agency.

The model should instead be genuinely interagency. State can provide diplomatic leadership while Commerce, EXIM, DFC, and other appropriate institutions bring commercial and financial tools. African governments and regional organizations should identify their requirements, while private companies determine whether proposed projects can survive commercial scrutiny. AFRICOM belongs at that table because it can contribute a perspective on security, access, logistics, and regional instability that civilian agencies may not possess.

This is increasingly consistent with AFRICOM's own direction. Its 2026 posture statement describes an effort to integrate economic considerations into strategy while connecting security, investment, and prosperity.²

The governing principle should nevertheless remain clear:

AFRICOM should participate in the commerce space without militarizing it.

If that arrangement works well, AFRICOM should rarely need to become the principal American actor. Once the military does become the principal actor, the nature—and cost—of the problem changes dramatically.

When Commerce Space Becomes Battlespace

Contracts will not prevent every war. Governments will still collapse, terrorist organizations will not always be negotiable, foreign powers will intervene, American citizens may require protection, and circumstances will arise in which military force becomes necessary.

When that happens, geography begins collecting its bill.

Africa is enormous, and American military power, however sophisticated, still depends upon access, fuel, maintenance, communications, intelligence, medical care, ammunition, transportation, and political permission to move people and equipment. AFRICOM states plainly that its crisis-response capability depends upon assured access to the continent and that diminishing access increasingly constrains its ability to respond effectively.⁶

The farther an American force moves into poorly developed continental Africa, the more difficult it becomes to reproduce the supporting architecture American forces normally expect. Aircraft require suitable airfields, maintenance, and fuel; ground vehicles require parts and recovery capability; personnel require dependable supplies of water, food, and medicine; wounded troops require treatment and evacuation; and sophisticated weapons and communications systems depend upon equally sophisticated supply chains. None of those requirements disappears merely because the opposing force is technologically inferior.

The modern U.S. military can project extraordinary power across enormous distances. The argument is not that America cannot operate effectively in interior Africa. It plainly can. The question is what it costs to preserve all of the advantages Americans normally expect once the force gets there.

African military history repeatedly demonstrates the importance of that distinction.

Rhodesian Fireforce operations emphasized speed, intelligence, helicopter mobility, and small forces in an environment where aviation resources were valuable and limited. South African forces operating over the vast distances of Namibia and Angola similarly confronted the relationship between mobility and sustainment. Fuel, maintenance, ammunition, medical support, transportation, and forward logistics were not secondary administrative concerns; they helped determine the pace and reach of operations.

Executive Outcomes later encountered many of the same underlying realities in a very different institutional setting. Its comparatively small forces operated with a far smaller support structure than a conventional Western military, but they did not somehow escape logistics. Instead, their operations were organized around those limitations, relying upon forward supplies, carefully allocated aviation, fuel and ammunition stocks, medical support, intelligence, and mobility.

Eeben Barlow's recent examination of Executive Outcomes' expeditionary logistics makes this point particularly useful for our purposes. He explains that Executive Outcomes initially drew upon SADF logistical doctrine but found that it could not simply be transplanted into the company's operations. Different African theaters required adaptations in sustainment, forward stocking, air delivery, and the organization of the force itself.⁷

Barlow's later Composite Warfare thinking is useful not because it provides the United States with a ready-made African doctrine, but because it begins with assumptions Western militaries sometimes prefer not to make: infrastructure may be poor, distances may be enormous, aviation may be limited, and a force ultimately has to operate within what the theater can sustain.

The value of these historical cases is therefore diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Across Rhodesian Fireforce operations, South African campaigns, and later Executive Outcomes experience, different organizations repeatedly confronted the same underlying problems of distance, limited infrastructure, scarce aviation, and difficult sustainment. Their responses emphasized mobility, intelligence, economy of force, decentralized action, and adaptation to available support. They generally began with scarcity as an assumption rather than treating it as an aberration.

The United States generally approaches the problem from the opposite direction. American forces bring an extraordinary supporting architecture with them, including airpower, intelligence, communications, precision weapons, medical care, maintenance, and logistics. That system produces enormous combat power and is one of America's greatest military advantages. The problem is not that it would suddenly cease to function in Africa; it is that maintaining all of those advantages becomes progressively more expensive, logistically demanding, and politically dependent as operations move farther into poorly developed continental territory.

Sea power illustrates the point particularly well. The United States Navy can project tremendous combat power from the waters surrounding Africa, but a carrier cannot make continental distance disappear. As an operation moves deeper inland, requirements for aerial refueling, forward airfields, transit time, logistics, and land-based support grow accordingly.

Sea power can reach deep into Africa. It cannot move the African interior closer to the sea.

The seemingly mundane requirements can become as consequential as weapons themselves. Clean water, blood, medicine, sanitation, fuel, and spare parts all consume transportation capacity and personnel, while every additional mile separating an operating force from a dependable logistical hub complicates their delivery. AFRICOM maintains theater-specific force-health requirements precisely because disease prevention and medical readiness remain operational considerations rather than historical curiosities.⁸

Africa imposes these realities regardless of whose flag appears on the uniform.

The Cost of Getting the Sequence Wrong

This is where the economic and military halves of American strategy need to meet.

Power plants, water systems, and transportation infrastructure are expensive. Credit guarantees expose taxpayers to risk, not every commercial investment will succeed, and no serious policy should pretend that economic development automatically eliminates political violence.

Military intervention, however, is also expensive—and generally begins only after the commercial environment has already deteriorated.

The comparison should therefore not be reduced to a convenient slogan such as a $50 million power plant prevents a $5 billion war. Foreign affairs are not that predictable, and such a claim would weaken rather than strengthen the argument.

The better question is whether a relatively modest commercial or economic intervention today could materially reduce the probability that the United States confronts a vastly more expensive security problem tomorrow. If the answer is yes, that opportunity belongs in national-security planning just as surely as an airbase, weapons system, or contingency plan does.

The United States spends enormous effort preparing to move troops, aircraft, medical support, fuel, ammunition, and supplies into crises. It should devote comparable intellectual energy to identifying circumstances in which capital, technology, infrastructure, and commerce can prevent the crisis from reaching that stage.

This is ultimately what Contracts Before Combat means. It is not a promise that a contract can stop a war. It is a demand that Washington employ more of America's considerable economic advantages before accepting war as the principal instrument available.

A Different Measure of American Power

America does not need another crusade in Africa. It does not need to recreate European colonial relationships, sell democracy at gunpoint, or construct an African NATO. Nor should it concede the continent's commercial future simply because competitors were willing to arrive earlier.

The United States possesses an extraordinary combination of capabilities: capital, technology, engineering, agriculture, energy, financial markets, industrial capacity, and military strength. The strategic mistake is not possessing too few instruments. It is too often employing them in the wrong order.

American military power must remain available when American interests genuinely require it. AFRICOM should be prepared for the unpleasant possibility that commerce and diplomacy fail, and Washington should take seriously the logistical challenges that would accompany operations in difficult parts of the continent.

But military preparedness should be the insurance policy, not the opening bid.

The United States should arrive in Africa offering contracts before combat, commerce space before battlespace, and partnership before prescription. That approach does not ask America to surrender its own interests; it recognizes that American interests can be advanced by creating relationships in which African countries, African businesses, American companies, and American workers all have something tangible to gain from stability.

The greatest strategic success may therefore not be the African crisis in which American forces arrive fastest. It may be the crisis that never requires them.

America does not have to own Africa's future. It merely has to offer Africans a compelling reason to want America in it.

Endnotes

1. U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Africa Command 2026 Posture Statement, May 15, 2026. AFRICOM characterizes Russia's approach as exploiting instability, using paramilitary forces to secure access to resources, and insulating regimes supportive of Russian activities.

2. U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Africa Command 2026 Posture Statement, May 15, 2026. The statement places economic engagement among the command's strategic instruments and discusses closer integration of economic considerations into U.S. engagement in Africa.

3. Ibid. AFRICOM argues that Chinese investment in African mining, infrastructure, transportation, and dual-use ports can create economic and security leverage and identifies control of critical minerals as a concern for the U.S. defense industrial base.

4. International Monetary Fund, Mali: 2025 Article IV Consultation—Staff Report, IMF Country Report No. 25/255. IMF staff estimated that outages of 10–16 hours daily, as experienced in 2024, could reduce annual GDP growth by approximately 0.5–0.8 percentage points, while emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding the estimate.

5. Export-Import Bank of the United States, “Sub-Saharan Africa.” EXIM reports that it supported $13.5 billion in transactions in sub-Saharan Africa between 2010 and 2023 and describes its principal instruments as loans, guarantees, and insurance supporting U.S. exports.

6. U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Africa Command 2026 Posture Statement. AFRICOM states that crisis response depends upon assured access and warns that diminishing access has increasingly constrained its ability to respond to crises.

7. Eeben Barlow, “Adapting and Managing Logistics for Expeditionary Forces in Africa: A Private Military View,” Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies 54, no. 1 (2026): 145–174. Barlow describes how Executive Outcomes found pre-1994 SADF logistical doctrine insufficient for its particular expeditionary requirements and adapted its sustainment model using lessons from operations in Angola and other African theaters.

8. U.S. Africa Command, “AFRICOM Force Health Protection Requirements,” June 29, 2026. AFRICOM maintains theater-specific medical and force-health guidance for personnel entering its area of responsibility.