Transcript
VICE ADMIRAL ROBERT T. MOELLER: Just very quickly by way of background, up till about the -- in terms of how I first got involved in this effort -- up to about late summer of ’06, I was the director of strategy plans and policy at Central Command, and then for a brief period of time worked for General Abizaid as a special assistant while the Navy was determining what my next assignment was going to be. During that period of time, I was approached by the Joint Staff, indicating that I was under consideration to head up the planning effort for the establishment of this command. In fact, within a few days, that came to fruition. Then Secretary Rumsfeld signed out a piece of paper directing that I would lead the implementation planning team, which was a group of about 30 or 40 of us that met over in the fall of ’06, starting in mid-November of ’06, over at Bolling Air Force Base where we worked with some initial direction from the Department in terms of identifying the principle issues that had to be worked out with regard to the establishment of the command. We did that over the course of close to about two months. We then briefed what that looked like to the Secretary. That got turned into a piece of paper that went to the President, and just before Christmas of 2006, he directed the stand-up of the command. And as you all know, it was formerly announced by the White House in early February of 2007.
About that same time, those of us who had been -- or many of us involved in the implementation planning team then became some of the initial members of the what we established as the transition team, the AFRICOM Transition Team, essentially the core of the initial headquarters staff. We established ourselves in Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, and you may ask, “Why, why there?” Two principle reasons: As we looked around for a place to initially establish the headquarters, we wanted some place that was as close to our area of operations as we could possibly be, and so being in Europe facilitated that. Also, because we were on a fairly short timeline to get ourselves established, there was already existing infrastructure at Kelley Barracks that we could move into because the Army’s 7th Core had previously been headquartered there up till about the mid 1990s, and so all those facilities were there. And some of that -- actually to this day, there’s renovation work going on with those facilities. And then the other reason is because as we’re currently organized within Defense, European Command is the biggest stakeholder for our military-to-military relations with our African partners as they are responsible for the relations for about 40 of the total countries across the continent. So, for all the planning work, the coordination and collaboration with them, particularly as we continue to move forward and look to assume responsibility for all the activities that they conduct with our African partners, it made sense to be as close as we could to their headquarters. And so, that’s why we started out there, and quite frankly that’s why we’re still there, and will be there for the foreseeable future.
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