ما فهمته من رد الجنرال ، هو الحفاظ على المناورات و نقل جزء منها الى دولة اخرى ،في اطار التنويع .
ان كان سوف يتم نقل جزء كبير فيجب ان ينسحب منها المغرب ، علما انه اشار الى عدم وجود دولة يمكنها استقبال المناورات
Moderator: Thank you very much. I’d like to go over now to – and take one of our live questions. I’d like to give the floor to Hiba Nasr
from Asharq News.
Question: Good morning. Good morning from D.C., and thanks for doing this. I want to ask about – I want to confirm, General, if the reports about – that the Defense Department is looking at alternative locations for the African Lion exercise, and how would this affect the relation with Morocco? Can you say something on that? Thank you.
General Townsend: Okay. So the short answer is yes, we are. Our U.S. law – our Congress passed our defense law for Fiscal Year ’22 that requires us to look at diversifying the exercise, and by diversifying the exercise, looking at maybe moving the exercise or elements of the exercise to other areas on the continent. We are engaged in that because we believe – in America we believe in civil control of the military, and our civilian leaders in our government have told us to do that. So we are faithfully doing that. What does that mean? So we’re looking at other places where we can have parts of – parts or all of African Lion to be conducted in the future. But here are the facts: Morocco has been our host for 18 African Lions, and they have a tremendous capacity to do it; their military capacity is very high; they also have the infrastructure, the training ranges, all of that. They are a fantastic host. So what we did this year is we used what we called a hub-and-spoke approach. So the hub, the center part of the wheel, was Morocco, but we had a spoke in Tunisia that was not insignificant. It was in excess of 500 personnel. We had a spoke in Senegal and we had a spoke in Ghana.
So we are going to – because we’ve been directed to do it, we are going to continue this exploration of how we might further diversify African Lion, and I think I would like – I am interested in having other African countries volunteer to host – co-host some or all of African Lion. We will send teams out to make these assessments and surveys, and happy to diversify the exercise. It will be difficult to find any country in Africa, I think, that can probably approach what Morocco has been able to do over 18 years. That will be hard to find someone who can do that, certainly on year one. So anyway, I hope that answers your question. We have been directed to diversify African Lion, but Morocco has been a fantastic host and I look forward to working with them on – we, AFRICOM, will work with them on future African Lions, I am sure.