A credible deterence will serve one purpose. Making sure that any adversary who thinks to attack NIGERIA or its vital interest concludes that the risk to him outweigh any potential gains. Once he understands that, he won’t attack. Nigeria’s unity can only be maintained through her military strength. Weakness only invites aggression.

Stakes were high during the era of successive military administrations, and the idea of an attack or going into war over territorial disputes and cross border incursions was very real. Thankfully back then Nigeria had the troops, equipment and reliable regional allies it needed to act as ECOWAS policeman while still keeping internal security challenges at bay.

But today, the Nigerian military is at best marginal. Though the military may have more military hardware relative to the region in abolute terms, we are operating in a region that is vastly different and more complex than what Nigeria had to face decade’s ago, and in many places more dangerous.

Way before Boko Haram our general’s have been warning us that the Nigerian military is running on life support and may be hardpressed to successfully protect its territory and vital interests, or beat back an invading army. The Niger Delta insurgency exposed a few cracks in the nation’s capacity to fulfil its security obligations. But the idea of a very powerful Nigerian military was enough to keep the political rulling class up at night. This is all good so long there never arises a situation where it would have to send young men and women to war.

The human and material cost of this decade long war with Boko Haram has been staggering. 35,000 killed, over 2 million displaced. Refugees in their own country.

We simply cannot take the readiness of our forces for granted. If the government inisists the nation does not have the resources to train and equip the military, the young men and women in the army, the air forc, navy and civilian population are the once who will pay the price. With their lives.

It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that we never send soldiers into harm’s way that are not trained, equipped, well led and ready for any contingency, to include war.

Thankfully the military has recently been given a long needed boost. There has been funds to modernise some equipments, as well as payments for the JF-17 multirole fighter from Pakistan and 12 A-29 Super Tucano aircraft from the United States and for the past two years an extra $1 billion has been allotted for munitions to support the war effort.

So where does the Nigerian military stand now after these boosts ?

Any improvement in the military has been marginal, given the mission that the military has to protect Nigeria. Some gains over the past couple of years, but still a long way to go. The military has clocked over 15 years of constant high tempo internal and external military operations against non state adversaries. Let’s not forget Nigeria is a continental power, with interests in West Africa.

All Nigeria has is barely enough to contain Boko Haram, and it took all Nigeria has. Nigeria is therefore unable to address its interest in the continent of Africa, even in West Africa.

The present Nigerian military can at best carry out sustained operations against a near peer adversary or even smaller much weaker countries It will take the entire military industrial complex and a total mobilization of the economy for the war, and won’t have anything leftover to do anything else, not even internal policing.

The Nigerian military used to have the capacity to carry out two sustained military operations at once anywhere in West Africa. This allowed Nigeria to do one, and then all domestic/policing operations. Today the military have forces deployed in all but two states of the Federation, in Gambia and until recently Sudan. Nigeria is losing ground overtime. As we use the military its wearing things out and attrition replacement is abysmally low

During decade’s of repressive military dictatorships, military preparedness was taken seriously. The nation had become a pariah state oweing to gross human right abuses. Kicked out of the Common Wealth of Nations with lingering border skirmishes. Needless to say there will be no parliamentary hearings when it comes to defence spending. Indeed for a considerable period of time there was no near peer military competitor anywhere in the region

The price for this was a repressive and autocratic government that left Nigerians living in fear. As soon as abacha died, culminating in transfer of political power back to the people, everybody wipes their brows and say never again, and so for years intentionally induced painful spending cuts was applied to the military.

Then the Niger Delta insurgency started. And so in 2004 the Nigerian military, after years of under investmemt and neglect was thrown into constant combat operations, and its been on an operational footing for the last 17 years. That’s lots of wear and tear. So the military has been flying jets, sailing ships, deploying troops and its wearing out the force.

And the amount of funding the government has applied against it has not kept pace with the workload it has placed on the military, even when operationally deployed in operations against the biggest existential threat the country has faced since the civil war.

The military is constantly being overworked yet it’s funding have remained abysmal. It wasn’t when Boko Haram started capturing, holding and administering huge swatches of land that the government realize the gravity of the security situation and pumped up funding in two year increments. But this is kind of to stem the bleeding, but not addressing the fundamental problem, budgeting and ageing equipment.

In the last decade as Nigeria has declined, particularly in the last 5 years we’ve seen a major comeback of Nigeria’s traditional geopolitical adversary into scene, with France in particular trying to use its wealth and cultural influence to really militarise its presence in West Africa.

Today we have very aggressive neighbours. We have disputes with Cameroon over cross border incursions. The once peaceful Cameroon is on the brink of a civil war, a war with the potential to drag Nigeria in by virtue of the proximity of Nigerian border towns with southern Cameroon. There is Chad and the yet resolved Lake Chad dispute. There is the U.S building drone bases all around the region. So far six Reaper drone bases basically blankets the length and breath of Nigeria.

We have Boko Haram and a growing ISWAP menace. We have clashes between Shite members and the police. We have herdesmen and bandits doing their own thing. And we also have French puppet dictators clandestinely sponsoring various terrorist groups in the country and causing all kinds of mayhem. It’s a complicated world for Nigeria right now and the military has really been stretched thin to do current operations.

Present state of the military

After the civil war the army’s active duty force was 450,000, today its 200,000. In 1986 the NAF had two squadrons of the MiG-21 Fishbird fighter jet and a Squadron of the Sepecat jaguar fighter jet, for a total of 36 fixed wing high performance fighter jets. This could be supplemented by at least 24 Alpha jet trainers and a similar number of Aero L-39 Albatross. These are trainers with secondary light attack capabilities.

Today Nigeria’s fixed wing attack aircrafts consists of Seven F-7Ni fighters and twelve Alpha jet trainers reconfigured for light attack missions. At any time only about half of these planes are flyable.

This shows how small the military has become in a region that is now more complicated with more capable actors. So we have a much smaller Nigerian military trying to do the workload of a regional military hegemon.

The weakest part of the military has been the Air Force. With the proliferation of new technologies, unmanned systems, rockets, sophisticated anti-aircraft systems like the Strela-2 and Stinger missiles, Nigeria requires modern equipments to deal with that. The most capable combat aircraft in the NAF attack fleet is the F-7Ni fighter, a Chinese mockup of the MiG 21 fighter, a second generation fighter that built in the 1950s. The average age of the aircraft’s in the NAF is above 35 years.

The Vickers Mk,3 Eagle tank was acquired in the late 1970s. The vast majority of army equipment were acquired in the 1970s. So we have old equipments that a being used up on a daily basis. The military needs a massive inject of money to bring it up to speed with the rest of the world.

The service that needs modernization and quantity the most is the Air Force. The Service has placed...

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D

Sai baba