Bumiller: It’s Not Unusual at All for Senators to Not Know We Have Troops in Africa

EXCERPT:

BUMILLER: "These days it’s not unusual at all. The U.S. has 240,000 troops overseas in most countries in the world. There are 6,000 U.S. troops alone in Africa, across the continent. This has just been part of the buildup overseas quietly since 9/11. And what this is, and what — how the Pentagon describes it, these are advise and assist missions, many of them, which the goal is to train local forces. And the idea that was really pushed hard during the Obama Administration was this was a way to avoid a lot of U.S. Troops overseas. They would just help local forces and train them and get them up to speed, and you can see this did not go as planned."