This past week the United States and Kenya broke ground on a major expansion of a key air base in the country used by the U.S. military for counterterrorism operations.
The United States launched a $70 million overhaul of the airfield infrastructure at the Manda Bay Air Base in Kenya. The base, operated by the Kenyan Defense Forces, is also used by American troops and is a hub for operations in the Horn of Africa. The groundbreaking also comes amid a sharp increase of U.S. military airstrikes against militant groups in Somalia such as al-Shabab and ISIS-Somalia.
Among the enhancements is a 10,000-foot expansion to the runway, allowing for greater operational capacity by aircraft. The project is being funded through the State Department, although the U.S. military is involved in operations at the base. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called it a “tangible commitment” to shared defense between the two nations. Notably, U.S. Africa Command head, Air Force Gen. Dagvin Anderson, attended the event. In 2024, the Biden administration designated Kenya as a major non-NATO ally, the first sub-Saharan country to receive that status.
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The expansion of the east African base’s infrastructure comes more than a year after major withdrawals from West and Central Africa. In 2024, American forces moved a majority of troops out of Chad and fully withdrew from Niger. The latter withdrawal came after a coup in the country and saw the U.S. lose access to two air bases that had been central to aerial counterterrorism operations in the region. Military leadership said the United States was looking at other nations to partner with to continue missions in West Africa.
U.S. forces, including members of the Air Force’s sole airlift unit in Africa, the 75th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, are based out of Camp Simba, part of the wider Manda Bay installation. The base in Kenya has not only been used by the United States to fight al-Shabab in Somalia, it also was the target of a major al-Shabab attack in 2020. The Jan. 5 attack saw 30 members of al-Shabab hammer the base with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. An Army soldier and two American contractors were killed, and several aircraft were destroyed. Airmen, Marines and Kenyan troops repelled the attack after an hour of fighting.
The Manda Bay base is strategically important given its proximity to Somalia, where the United States has been engaging in airstrikes and other combat missions for more than two decades. Most of those strikes have targeted al-Shabab, although it has increasingly gone after ISIS’s Somalia branch as well. In late December, the U.S. also carried out cruise missile strikes in Nigeria, nominally targeting ISIS although the results of those attacks remain unclear.
The United States has sharply increased airstrikes and other combat missions in Somalia since the start of the second Trump administration. In 2025, the U.S. carried out 126 attacks in the country, according to the New American Foundation which has been tracking combat operations there. That’s nearly double the second-highest year, in 2019 during the first Trump administration, when American forces conducted 66 operations. December ended with a major wave of airstrikes over four days by the United States. So far in 2026, American forces conducted 23 strikes in Somalia, AFRICOM told AFP.
