In the shadows of what was once called the „dark continent,“ a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and – north to south, east to west – you‘ll find the fruits of that effort: a network of bases, compounds, and other sites whose sum total exceeds the number of nations on the continent. For a military that has stumbled from Iraq to Afghanistan and suffered setbacks from Libya to Syria, it‘s a rare can-do triumph. In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the US military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war.