The US's expanding military role in Africa:

Plen­ty of peo­ple have ask­ing; why are we now pub­licly announc­ing that U.S. troops are chas­ing the LRA and that we’re build­ing air­fields in Africa after years of Pen­ta­gon being very wary of too much pub­lic­i­ty for its African ops? Could the Pen­ta­gon’s inter­ests in Africa have grown beyond sim­ply fight­ing Islam­ic ter­ror­ists to fight­ing desta­bi­liz­ing insur­gen­cies across the con­ti­nent? Or maybe these moves are meant to check increased Chi­nese influ­ence on the con­ti­nent? This is pure spec­u­la­tion, there could be a ton of answers to this ques­tion.