Africans, Americans and Europeans united to form a Multi-National Coordination Center (MCC) as part of Exercise Flintlock May 10, 2010, at Camp Baangre in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Flintlock 10, U.S. Africa Command's (AFRICOM) special operations forces exercise, is conducted to develop the capacity of participating nations' militaries.
The MCC is the exercise's hub for information sharing, operations planning and collaboration between the militaries of Tran-Saharan nations, the United States and Europe.

"The exercise is a very effective tool. It is a lasting or continuing effort for collaboration," Mali Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jean Claude Coulibaly, Intelligence Fusion Cell director, said through a translator. "It's a great opportunity for us to work together to collaborate, to cooperate with our partners in order to face terrorism, which is a threat that is common to all of us. So having this type of exercise and being able to practice and participate in this exercise is a benefit to all partners facing an international threat which is terrorism."

Terrorist activities in the Maghreb region of Africa within the past year have caused a more urgent realization that countries in this part of the world must work together to combat this increasing threat, according to Lieutenant Colonel Chris Schmitt, Flintlock chief of operations.

"Kidnapping for ransoms, attacks against the French Embassy in Mauritania, murder of an American in Mauritania, and of a U.K. citizen in Mali, attacks against military in Niger, Mali, Mauritania...all over the last year have solidified to these officers here at the MCC that there's something more that they need to learn," Schmitt said. "There's something more that needs to be discussed and decided upon and the MCC provides a venue in order to determine what that more is."

The MCC has three main components: the Joint Operations Center, the information clearing house that receives and disseminates information to ultimately attain desired effects on the ground and mission accomplishment; the Intelligence Fusion Cell (IFC), which gathers and reports intelligence, and the Combined Planning Group that applies a unique cultural perspective in analysing IFC's reports to make decisions about how to best respond to an event or issue to achieve the greatest desired effects.

MCC cells are comprised of multi-national participants working together and sharing information. However, a culmination exercise in the final week will hand all functions over to the participating African nations to execute. This will test their ability to conduct tasks and to work with each other to successfully accomplish the mission.

"By the end of the next week the Africans are running the entire planning process here and it's being executed on the ground by the African commanders and the Europeans and the U.S. are starting to take a step in the background. That's the ultimate goal for the end of next week -- that almost the entire exercise is run by the Africans for the Africans. And the desire for Flintlock 11 is that it has even a greater African look that you don't see as much U.S. equipment, but you have African equipment in the exercise."

Flintlock 10's MCC not only served as command center for an exercise of 1,500 participants, but also unified multi-national partners in their resolve in building capacity in Africa.

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