U.S. military cutting back on medevac services in W. Africa
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is sharply reducing its emergency casualty evacuation services in West Africa, raising concerns that U.S. troops on missions there could be left vulnerable if they run into trouble at a time when violence is surging in that corner of the continent.
The action by the Pentagon’s Africa Command comes shortly after U.S. military advisers accompanied forces in Niger last month on a major counterterrorism operation near Diffa, a small town on the border with Nigeria that has been a hot spot for attacks by the militant group Boko Haram.
It was the first time U.S. forces in Niger had joined a combat mission alongside their local counterparts since 2017, when U.S. commanders imposed strict guidelines on ground forces. Those new restrictions were imposed after an ambush in October that year near the border with Mali that left four American soldiers dead.
At issue now is the military’s decision to cancel a $23 million annual contract with Erickson, an aviation services company that flies logistics and casualty evacuation flights for Army Green Berets who have been training and advising Nigerien troops for two years in Arlit, a remote city in northern Niger. Nigerien troops have been conducting operations to intercept terrorists flowing in and out of Libya.
But that mission has faded. The Green Berets, members of the 20th Special Forces Group from Alabama, are moving some 500 miles southwest of Arlit to carry out a higher-priority mission to help confront a toxic mix of Islamic State and al-Qaida fighters in the tri-border region of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The Africa Command says it already has enough medevac support for that area and no longer needs Erickson’s two Bell 214ST helicopters.
Battlefield commanders have described medical aid to troops on the ground as an ethical obligation. The Defense Department in war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq have followed a “golden-hour standard,” in which the military seeks to whisk wounded U.S. troops from the battlefield within an hour of being wounded.
But in Africa, the time frame for evacuating injured U.S. troops is much longer, particularly in the expanse of West Africa’s Sahel region, a vast sub-Saharan scrubland that stretches from Senegal to Sudan. Niger alone is nearly twice the size of Texas. In the case of the deadly ambush in October 2017, it took more than four hours to evacuate the dead and wounded.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper is weighing deep cuts to U.S. troops on the continent, closing a new $110 million drone base in Niger and ending aid to French forces battling militants who are surging in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.
Col. Christopher Karns, the chief spokesman for the Africa Command, said that the Erickson contract was not being renewed because the troops were being repositioned.
“Medical evacuation capacity exists where they are moving, so we assess no increased risk to our forces,” Karns said.