 My name is Admiral Jamie Fogo. I'm a retired admiral. I retired in September of 2020. My last job was as Commander Naval Forces Europe, Commander Naval Forces Africa, Commander Allied Joint Force Command for NATO for the Southern Flank. I spent a lot of time on the continent of Africa and I'm delighted to come on board as one of the senior military advisors here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. If you look at the continent of Africa in West Africa, there are a lot of problems with illicit trafficking and also terrorism as a result of Boko Haram and ISIS West Africa. You can't really get into Lake Chad because ISIS controls that region. In East Africa, Al-Shabaab, and they've done some horrible things as late as last week in attacks in Somalia. And of course, there was the horrible attacks that occurred in Kenya just a few years ago and they still resonate today. From the sea, it's very important to be able to control your territorial waters. And I started working with them back in 2009, 2010, where the United States provided them with small boats that could go out not far from shore, maybe about three miles from land. They're called Defender Boats and they ran these things up and down the shores without any real coordination. And things started to really change back in 2012 when the Africans came up with the Yawande Code of Conduct and it was lines or territorial boundaries at sea and as one African nation crossed into another African nation's waters or a bad actor, illicit trafficker or a violent extremist organization on a ship passed from one nation to another, they were able to track them with our help. And if you can track them, you can deter them or you can interdict them and that was the name of the game. And between 2010 to 2020, I have to tell you the progress was unbelievable. It was like night and day. And I think the Africans realized that turning an ungoverned space into a governed space was not only good for the people of Africa and keeping protein in the mouths of Africans and not somebody who was fishing illegally but also brought money into the economy as these fines came in. So in the Africa Leaders Summit, this is just one of the things that I think that they can talk about and that we can provide some additional solutions to African problems. So I look forward to it and I look forward to the results. Just the fact that we're doing it is important. I mean, if you look at the statistics from the UN, there'll be two and a half billion people on the African continent in 54 countries by 2050. That's a quarter of the population of the world will claim African continental citizenship, if you will. And that's a pretty important diaspora of the world. And I'm a little disappointed that up until this time, the United States has been distracted elsewhere. The war in Ukraine certainly hasn't helped and Africa has become a second tier or third tier priority, needs to move up because it's really important. The Chinese are there, the Russians are there and the United States of America needs to be there too. A lot of folks in the United States are unaware that there is already an initiative underway. It's called the NATO Strategic Direction, South Hub for the Middle East and North Africa. If you look at what the Chinese do or the Russians do on the African continent, everything is bilateral. So they try to split traditional alliances and they try to move African countries away from their former colonial ties or from the United States of America. So I asked around and everybody said, you know what, if you want to go someplace like NATO and make progress in Africa, go to the African Union. My first trip to Addis was kind of the first cup of tea and I made a couple of trips down there and we made inroads and we made friends and sooner or later we had a memorandum of agreement with the African Union and a liaison office and officers from different European countries, former colonial powers that were interested, so the Luciferan countries from Portugal, the Dutch were down there, the French were down there helping us out and the Turks. And the Turks had an agreement with Ethiopia so they keep people there longer than anybody else. They had a status of forces agreement, none of the other countries including the US did. And so we started to make a lot of progress with the five standing African armies and also the regional economic institutions like ECOWAS. And we made friends with a number of academic institutions. The Kofi Anon Center was one of our best points of contact down in Ghana. And as we proceeded forward, we started to make progress. That was all set back by COVID and also the current conflict going on between Eritrea and Ethiopia. And long for the day that we can get back in there. But this initiative started by Jens Stoltenberg and the North Atlantic Council was well underway in 2018 thanks to Admiral Howard and continued on my watch until 2020 and now we've got to get back in there and get into it. I think that's really the way to expand our horizons. And the African Union has tentacles that reach out to all 54 African countries and it's smart ball. Instead of going country to country like China or Russia does, you approach all of them at once. And I think that's the way to make progress. And I hope that the leaders at the African summit take that into account and pay considerable attention to what the African Union says when they come to the table.