I read your links, and what the article says is that actually the idea for the mini-bases was in response to Benghazi.
I think it's a good idea. It makes strategic / tactical sense. They've got all these small bases now, 200 max personnel each, and they've got a runway on them and they've got those osprey plane / helicopter combo things.
So the idea is that wherever there's trouble, *forces can be quickly concentrated*. It's the "lilypad" strategy with 100 small bases versus 20,000 troops concentrated on one big base that can't respond to the other side of the continent.
That would help if there's ever another US embassy in danger or another "benghazi," OR TERRORSIM.
At any point in Africa, if there's trouble, then there's that radial network of US bases and they can just fly in to where the trouble's at.
You're acting like this is a big outrage, but it looks to me like whoever's in charge of Africom is doing a good job.
(anology -- think about which would be smarter for a state, just one big police department with 20,000 police but then they can't ever respond fast enough on the other end of the state.. or do you have local PD's instead so response time is faster. It's logical, no?
The old way of doing things was for the cold war era and massive armies, so you had big bases. But now the priority is *rapid response* -- to terrorism and embassies under threat from riots and such, and then also it's actually Putin that started the model of rapid action forces and smaller more mobile forces.)