Can you elaborate a little? I don’t know anything about this issue at all. I’m generally disposed towards much less overall military spending but I don’t really feel knowledgeable enough to know if this particular move would be good or bad.
The US has had a presence to fight the war on terror in Africa for for the last 20 years or so. At the beginning it focused solely on Eastern Africa and the Somali region mainly. This was due to it being a bad area and we had an established base in Djibouti to operate out of.
Following the fall of Gaddafi and emergence of terror groups in Libya, we begin to combat the groups operating in Libya and northern Africa. We had to launch our surveillance aircraft from a safe location, which is a NATO ally, but it had restrictions, like no ordinance on the aircraft and it came with longer transit times.
After Benghazi we ramped up in Libya and we realized that a lot of the core problems with terrorism was coming from central and western Africa. Drones and manned aircraft could not reach those locations from the places they were taking off from and we couldn't effective fight the enemy otherwise. That pushed our desire to expand to Niger.
Right now our boots on ground operations are limited to "advise and assist" ops. Basically its a handful of US personnel that train large groups of that countries forces and then stand back during operations to advise.
This drone base is huge for the region because it offers a larger area of surveillance, protection and strike options. Our guys can go out on missions with overhead support. This is huge. The drones also offer a lot of additional intelligence capabilities.
Boko Haram is one of the most violent terrorist organizations remaining and very large in numbers. The reason you never hear about us fighting them is that we couldn't effective reach out to develop the intelligence and conduct operations. This base allows the US to do that.
Bottom line is that its a goal we have be working towards for years and we're finally on the doorstep, however, Boko Haram is not a global threat. They are regional and in a region without a lot of US interests.
So the call really boils down to do we continue with this line of effort or do we pull back and focus on the emerging threats that are much more likely to impact American interests? I don't see this as an issue of "less spending" just where we are going to spend the current budget.