Kenya and the United States commissioned a new Marine Range and Close Quarters Battle (CQB) training complex at Kenya Navy Base Mtongwe in Mombasa County on 25 March 2026, giving the Kenya Navy’s marine commandos a permanent home for live-fire and tactical training.
The ceremony closed a two-day visit to Nairobi and Mombasa by U.S. Navy Adm. George Wikoff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa and Allied Joint Force Command Naples, on 24-25 March. Maj. Gen. Paul Otieno, Commander of the Kenya Navy, joined Wikoff to cut the ribbon on the facility, which sits inside the existing Mtongwe base southwest of Mombasa.
The complex cost $750,483 and was built under Section 333 of U.S. law, a Building Partner Capacity authority that lets the Pentagon fund training and equipment for foreign forces. Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command Europe, Africa, Central (NAVFAC EURAFCENT) managed the design-build contract, with U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa as the lead office on the American side. Kenyan outlets have put the cost at roughly 97 million Kenyan shillings, in line with the dollar figure at current exchange rates.
The facility gives Kenya’s Marine Commandos, a force that has taken on a larger role in coastal counterinsurgency work, three things they lacked before: a 100-meter small-arms range, a live-fire shoot house for rehearsing room clearance and hostage-rescue drills, and a separate dry-run rehearsal area for walking through tactics without live ammunition. Officials said the layout is meant to replicate the cramped, fast-moving conditions of a ship boarding or a raid on a coastal compound, rather than the open lanes of a conventional rifle range.
“Kenya is a critical maritime and security partner in East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean,” Wikoff said in a NAVAF release. He added that the partnership rests on “shared interests and shared sacrifices” in protecting sea lanes and countering regional threats.
In Nairobi, Wikoff also met Gen. Charles Kahariri, Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF), to discuss longer-term modernization plans, coordination between the two militaries and how to align security priorities along the coast and the Somali border. The Mtongwe handover and the Nairobi talks both fall under a five-year defense cooperation framework that Washington and Nairobi signed in September 2023, when then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Kenyan Defense Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale put their signatures to a roadmap covering training, equipment and interoperability through 2028. Much of the public attention on that 2023 deal centered on a pledged $100 million in U.S. support tied to Kenya’s leadership of a multinational security mission in Haiti, but the framework itself covers the broader bilateral relationship, including the kind of infrastructure now standing at Mtongwe.
The CQB complex also opened as Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 2026 wrapped up. CARAT is a recurring exercise built around interoperability between the Kenya Navy, the U.S. Navy and Interpol, with this year’s iteration focused on maritime surveillance and intelligence-sharing to track illicit activity in the Western Indian Ocean. “By integrating our capabilities and sharing information, we are better prepared to secure the maritime domain, disrupt illicit networks, and respond swiftly when threats emerge,” Wikoff said of the drill.
For Washington, the range is a small but tangible piece of a broader effort to build up Kenyan naval capacity rather than substitute for it. In 2024, U.S. Africa Command donated 6,730 pieces of protective gear worth $1.38 million to the KDF, including soft body armor, ballistic helmets and plates rated against rifle fire. Kenya has separately moved to expand its own maritime industrial base, opening Kenya Shipyards Limited’s Mombasa yard at Mtongwe in December 2021, the first facility of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.
The investment fits a pattern of layered U.S. engagement across the region this year. Kenya hosted Justified Accord 2026 in early March, a multinational exercise AFRICOM runs annually with East African partners, and Kenyan vessels also took part in Cutlass Express 2026, a separate AFRICOM-sponsored maritime exercise aimed at building surveillance and interdiction skills among coastal states. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, who took over as AFRICOM commander, made Kenya the first stop on his inaugural Africa trip in September 2025, holding talks at Defence Headquarters in Nairobi on building capacity and coordinated operations.
The new range addresses a specific gap rather than a general one. Kenya’s Marine Commandos had access to firing ranges before, but nothing purpose-built for the close-quarters, room-to-room scenarios that define ship boardings, port security responses and counter-piracy operations. A dedicated shoot house lets a unit train repeatedly on the kind of split-second decisions that open-range shooting cannot replicate, and doing that training at home cuts down on the cost and disruption of sending commandos abroad for the same instruction.
The facility’s location also matters. Mtongwe sits at the mouth of Mombasa’s harbor and already hosts the Kenya Navy’s main base and the new shipyard, putting the training complex close to the patrol craft and personnel most likely to use it. That concentration of capability points to Mtongwe’s continuing role as the anchor of Kenya’s naval posture on the Indian Ocean side of the country, distinct from the smaller Lamu-area presence near Manda Bay further north.
None of this resolves the underlying security picture along the coast, where al-Shabab remains active across the border in Somalia and smuggling networks continue to exploit the same waters CARAT and Cutlass Express are meant to police. A new range builds skill, not force structure, and Kenya’s navy still operates a modest fleet relative to the area it is asked to cover. What the Mtongwe complex does is close one piece of a training gap that both governments have flagged for years.
The next marker to watch is whether the partnership scales beyond infrastructure. Kenya’s defense planners have talked publicly about expanding their fleet and adopting new technology, and the 2023 framework runs through 2028, leaving room for further U.S.-funded projects at Mtongwe or elsewhere along the coast before that agreement comes up for renewal.