Professionalizing Armed Forces in Africa: No Easy Game. Why Not?

In this paper we focus on recent attempts of the international community to help African nations to professionalize their armed forces towards proper and effective capacities in dealing with new security threats all over the continent. One of these programs is the US-led African Partnership Station. In the framework of this program, the Netherlands Navy has launched a project called African Winds 2013, in which seven West-African countries were visited to train themselves and host-national militaries, particularly marine and navy forces, in: diving, hydrographic research, amphibious landing operations, illegal fishery policies, boarding procedures aimed at anti-piracy measures, economic development, etc.  In this paper an assessment will be given of those activities, based on field work at sea and evaluations by the participants themselves. There will be a connection with previous research on training and educating young African cadet-officers in Western military academies. Both endeavours will be analyzed on the basis of mixed-methods military sociological research.