Partner nations and members of the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa hosted the first Logistics in East Africa Forum July 12 at the Kempinski Palace, Djibouti.
The forum incorporated foreign national partners operating in East Africa, exchanging logistical knowledge.
“In East Africa, we continue to build up our combined logistical network because it’s so critical for everything we do – our defense, diplomacy, development mission of promoting stability and prosperity,” said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jami Shawley, commanding general of CJTF-HOA. “This forum is a multinational logistics meeting bringing together all of our partners, and our aim here is to exchange knowledge about our capabilities to improve our interoperability, burden sharing, and to enhance our combined ability to support logistical activities.”
Shawley further added this forum will encourage like-minded partners thinking toward logistical improvement.
The originator of the forum, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Bosar Bozdogan, CJTF-HOA regional planner, said he identified the need for a LEAF upon realizing the communication deficits between partners. The command itself was regularly engaged with their partners, but those partners weren’t aware of what the other partners were doing.
The forum was the first of its kind for the East Africa region, involving partners from Djibouti, Kenya, South Korea, Japan, and Europe.
“This is a global effort for stability, prosperity, for all of the things that are good on the globe,” said Shawley. “There are things that we can help to make better and the way you win at that is understanding, professionalizing and partnering in logistics. We can find the synergy to do things more, to do things better than we can do alone.”
Bozdogan added that the partnerships created could potentially result in aiding the current supply chain issues impacting the globe.
“With the supply chain issues in the world, we’re seeing the importance of logistics,” said Bozdogan. “Since all the world is going through the issues, we can work together and in these tough times, we can help each other logistically, which will increase our opportunities to reach our goals in the region, which is bringing prosperity and peace.”
Shawley, too, said she believes networking is the key to accomplishing shared national and global interests in doing things better.
“If we can do things more efficiently, we can work toward the common goals that we do share, and we’re all better for that,” said Shawley. “Logistics is the absolute best way to do that, because it is the hardest thing that any of us do and it is the most fundamentally critical thing that any of us do.” CJTF-HOA has utilized current relationships to assist partners with logistical issues when needed.
“With our Japanese partners, we’ve conducted some vehicle recovery validation operations, our French partners have helped us in enumerable ways, and recovery networks, oxygen tanks for an Italian plane in an emergency,” said Shawley. “There are a lot of examples where we shared small things, primarily we mean locally, and I think this forum gives us an opportunity to look more expansively across the nearly unfathomably large continent of Africa and how we conduct our sustainment operations.”
Shawley added she is looking forward to learning from all the foreign national partners operating in East Africa and gave her commitment to find best ways to work together to enhance logistics.
