Abolish AFRICOM, Then Keep Going
May 31, 2025
By: Justin Logan
If the Trump administration wants to cut Pentagon waste and avoid future wars, it should set its sights on abolishing the Combatant Command system.
The torrent of foreign policy news in the second Trump administration flows so fast that big ideas are often swamped and sink. One such case was the report in February that President Trump was considering abolishing Africa Command (AFRICOM).
Abolishing AFRICOM is a good idea, but it is only a start. The Trump administration should shut down all the regional Combatant Commands (COCOMs).
The idea may seem radical, but the current structure of super-empowered Combatant Commands only emerged in 1986, when Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act that reorganized the Department of Defense (DOD).
Under Goldwater-Nichols, the COCOMs would have “broad, continuing missions…composed of forces from two or more military departments.” The idea was to diminish competition between the various services of the military by forcing them to work together in a given theater under combatant commanders—“jointness” is the military term. While jointness in fighting wars has its benefits, jointness in peacetime, including budgeting and planning, has notable downsides.
For decades, scholars and policymakers have known that the COCOMs are bloated and have grown beyond reasonable bounds. As a Washington Post article 25 years ago noted, Combatant commanders have “evolved into the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire’s proconsuls—well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of US foreign policy.”
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/abolish-africom-then-keep-going
