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home > April 21, 2008 issue > article
Bootstrapping in Africa
By Kevin Fogarty
Special to Defense Systems
Africom examines information sharing for nations short on infrastructure
The new Africa Command is evaluating ways that it might
promote better security on the continent. One option being examined
involves information-sharing via software.
There are, however a few catches. The countries for which the
software is intended don’t use anything like it. They might not have
the technological infrastructure to run it, or the budget to afford the
communications networks required to make using the software
practical.
The company behind the software initiative is Sentek Consulting,
a seven-year-old company with 40 employees and offices in San
Diego and Falls Church, Va. The company’s management team is
predominantly made up of former Navy officers, including a retired
rear admiral and a former special warfare officer. Sentek is building
a classic military command-and-control system designed for developing
nations in Africa.
The idea is to give developing countries information sharing
capabilities similar to that of U.S. law enforcement agencies. The
system — a communications portal based on the open-source JBoss
Web server, portals, Web services and other common Internet applications
— is designed to centralize information required for the effective
administration of a large country, across everything from fiberoptic
connections to the slowest cell-phone data networks.
The eventual goal is to build an Interpol-like critical-report capability
in all the countries in the African Union. But before Sentek can aspire to
that goal, it first has to convince an African country to let Sentek install
and develop the prototype in a practical, cost-effective system.
“This is risky; we admit that,” said Eric Basu, president of Sentek
Consulting. “To go someplace like this without a clear product and
clear understanding of the costs involved is not a very good business
model.”
But there is a market in Africa, he said, for systems that can help
civilian governments run more effectively by eliminating delays in
the dissemination of critical information from the provinces. “There
is money in Africa, you just have to be pretty clear what you’re planning
to do for people and what the benefit will be,” said Basu, who
has a master’s in business administration and is a special-forces commander
in the Naval Reserve.
“There is so much of a need down there [Africa] in terms of countering
what I’m sure is a growing threat — not only [the war on terrorism],
but the threat of drought and famine and locusts and AIDS
and TB, and a whole host of threats that someone is going to have
to do something about.”
PREVENTING WAR
Sentek is counting on the newly created U.S. Africa Command to
help develop, evangelize and eventually sell the command software.
Africom is evaluating Sentek’s work as one of the resources it can
offer to assist African nations, Basu said.
Africom, which was created out of the U.S. European Command
in February 2007, is scheduled to become a full-fledged unified command
in October. It is charged with collaborating with African
nations and nongovernmental organizations to increase regional
security to prevent war.
Africom’s public affairs officers did not reply to several requests
for interviews or confirmation of Sentek’s approach.
“Africa has had more than its share of military conflicts,” said
Todd Moss, U.S. deputy undersecretary of State responsible for economic
affairs and technological development in Africa.
“When we deal with our African partners, we’re really thinking
about three main priorities,” Moss said. “The first is to help build
up their military and defense capacities, to help professionalize
their militaries so they are defending their countries rather than
abusing their own citizens. The second is to help develop African
peacekeeping capabilities — battalions that have been in place in
resolving seven of the eight major conflicts over the last few years.
The third is to help those countries control their borders to reduce
a range of transnational threats: drug trafficking, illegal arms trafficking,
terrorism.”
Although the kind of command-and-control systems Sentek is
pitching would play a role in promoting that kind of stability and unified command of national resources, Moss is unaware of
Sentek’s involvement or any high-priority requests from African
nations looking for national collaboration or information-sharing
systems specifically.
“There are specific request lists with any peacekeeping operations,
but our discussions tend to be more along the lines of new roads,
telecommunications infrastructures, that kind of thing,” Moss said.
Pitching sophisticated computer systems to countries with a
greater need for paved roads, increases in the number of phone towers
and long-distance microwave relays to increase telecommunications
capacity — not to mention health and economic aid — is a peculiarly
U.S. misunderstanding of the needs of Africans, said Mark
Malan, peacebuilding program officer at the relief organization
Refugees International.
“We had a bunch of U.S. officers and trainers come to help train
peacekeepers, and they were talking about the 3-D battlespace and
mobilized infantry, and we were struggling to field a couple of HIVriddled
battalions for peacekeeping in the Congo,” said Malan, who
went to work for African peacekeeping groups after his retirement
from two decades in the South African military.
The theoretical benefit of good command-and-control software
would certainly help, but few African countries are equipped to take
advantage of it, Malan said. Even Nigeria, whose economic and military
dominance and comparative technical sophistication made it
Sentek’s obvious first choice for a potential customer, is far too
inconsistent in both its infrastructure and the skills of its people.
“The best and brightest Africans are abroad, working with the
[International Monetary Fund] or the [United Nations] or the World
Bank,” Malan said. “Back at home you’d need the human resources
— the people who are capable of understanding a new way to do
things or manage the software, and you just don’t have it.
“Nigeria is definitely the superpower in the region, but it’s also the
most corrupt,” Malan said. “If this software had some incorruptibility
built in, then that would be something; but I don’t really see it.”
The prototype Sentek built for Africom does have a range of
information controls built in — to satisfy the requirements of governments
that are far more controlling about their information than the
corporations or developers that typically work on open-source
applications, Basu said.
“You have to be sensitive to that need for control and conservatism,”
he said. “Not everyone is as excited about sharing information
on open source as people on Twitter.”
Sentek is building the applications using grants authorized under
Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2006,
which authorizes the Defense Department to spend $300 million to
train and equip foreign governments for operations to increase their
own political stability or counterterrorism groups.
The blueprint and outline of the system is complete, and Sentek
has tested some aspects of it — such as the ability to use cell phones,
Google Earth and the Internet to exchange pictures of eight different
areas in Niger, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana and elsewhere to
demonstrate that exchanging complex data is possible using relatively
simple technology.
The system’s design uses a classic military approach that is built
into countless military command, control, communications, computers,
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications,
said Hamlin Tallent, vice president of C4ISR systems at Sentek and
a retired Navy rear admiral.
“The broad view of the system we’re working on is that it’s a collaboration
and execution platform,” said Cameron Matthews, chief
technology officer at Sentek. “It involves a lot of visualization and
mapping tools for geographic data, tracking tasks and calendars so
that we can see what’s going on, and see after-action reports that let
us see what went wrong, so we can do more planning to see what
the next round of activity should be.”
It’s designed using a JBoss Enterprise Service Bus and portals as
a central communication point, allowing almost any Internet-capable
machine to act as a client.
That’s important in countries in which cell phone networks, radio, short-range Wi-Fi and landlines of varying bandwidth and quality
could all make up pieces of an operations and emergency response
network for a client country, Tallent said.
One of the reasons the system is built only as a prototype is that
critical issues — such as how to connect via existing media — are
uncertain, and the controls, workflow and data repositories all
depend on the needs of the government implementing the system,
said Matthews.
The next question for Sentek is whether Africom will take an
active role in promoting the software — which it contracted with
Sentek to build — to African client states. At press time, there was no
confirmation of whether that decision had been made or what form
the support would take.
MISTRUSTED SYSTEMS
Africom is facing criticism from a number of African states and commentators,
however, many of whom are suspicious of U.S. motives
in creating a military command focused on the continent.
Africom takes pains to note on its Web site that its 1,300-person
staff is made up almost exclusively of planners and analysts, and
the command itself has no current in fighting or planning wars.
Africom’s site notes that the United States spends $9 billion per
year in Africa on support for AIDS, education, famine prevention
and other causes, and only $250 million on military operations.
Still, Basu said, the reaction of some African organizations to “a
bunch of white dudes, ex-military, trying to sell something is: ‘Are
you CIA?’ There’s a lot of distrust.”
There might also be a lack of confidence that has nothing to do
with trust, Malan said. One of the U.S. contributions to African
peacekeeping efforts a few years ago was the donation of 40 computers
and war-gaming software to the Kofi Annan International
Peace Keeping Training Centre in Ghana, Malan said.
“Within three or four months, all the officers they trained on those
systems had been sent out of country for peacekeeping operations,”
Malan said. “There was no one left who knew what to do with them,
so they just sat and gathered dust.”
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