ember the nearly 300 schoolgirls kidnapped in April by Boko Haram? They're mostly still missing. The world's attention has moved on, but the U.S. military is still flying reconnaissance missions looking for them. It's also still searching for Joseph Kony, the murderous leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a guerrilla group that first operated in Uganda but has since moved into a handful of other central African countries. Like the missing schoolgirls, Kony once inspired a viral social media campaign but lately has garnered little attention. Authorities think he's hiding in Kafia Kingi, a contested area along the Sudan-South Sudan border where U.S. and African Union troops have little access.
In this crisis-heavy summer, once high-priority missions are quickly falling off the public's -- and sometimes the national security establishment's -- radar. Even the biggest of U.S. military missions --Afghanistan, where roughly 29,000 U.S. troops are deployed -- seems to be on Washington's back burner compared with Ukraine and the threat of the Islamic State. But the commanders running these operations, as well as the personnel carrying them out, certainly haven't forgotten.
The Pentagon's top five "forgotten missions" follow...
Authors
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Richard Fontaine
President
Richard Fontaine is the President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He served as a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at CNAS from 2009-2012 and previously as fo...
