₦airaland Forum

Hi IdomaLikita,

I appreciate your comments. Beegeagle's blog was great while it lasted. My only regret was that years of analysis on the blog is buried forever in the archives of the blog.
And only the moderator has easy access to them. One's analysis may be spot on, and proven by events, but you cannot easily retrieve them to demonstrate your gravitas.

Anyway, peccavi, a fellow blogger has a very good blog. Frequent guest Colonel Eeben Barlow has one under his new outfit STTEP, the south African blog/review Defenseweb is probably the best on African issues.

And you also have Bidexiii's thread, the heir to Sirius Black here on NairaLand.

IdomaLikita:
Nice to see ur posts again after a while...since the days of Beegeagle and Sirius Black...I have enjoyed ur analysis..pls could you recommend some blogs for me to keep up with African Military progress?

Ladies and Gentlemen. Whomever you support, we as Nigerians still have to get to the bottom of official corruption, both military and civilian, and our procurement system.

Yes GEJ bought 2 stealth OPVs from china, but with oil averaging 120/barrel thru out his administration, that is chicken change. The ships don't even have any missiles.

In the meantime, our mates in Algeria were purchasing Chinese guided missile destroyers and helicopters carriers in the billions of dollars. Morocco bought the FREMM frigate (really a Guided missile destroyer) during the same period.

Egypt, albeit with US aid, just bought 2 French Mistral helicopter carriers initially intended for Russia.

Nigeria's income during GEJ's administration, probably dwarfs that of the abovementioned nations combined, Yet we only have 2 missile less Offshore Patrol Vessels to show for it. Our little neighbor equatorial guinea has more potent ships than us.

Our air force can't even stand up tall in sub-Saharan Africa, talk less of comparisons to north African, south African, Ethiopian, eritrean and Angolan air forces.

The military budgets from 2007 thru 2015 were essentially looted by some in the military brass and the civilian leadership, while soldiers were dying, and being out gunned by Boko haram.

IN one case, brand new Mi-35 attack helicopters were over priced by a factor of 3, then to add insult to injury, a used older Mi-24 was purchased instead without the rotors.
The wrong rotors was then attached to this attack helicopter, it was the wrong fit, it led to the chopper crashing, and the death of at least one of our brave pilots.
Who ate the money ??

This crash happened in yola, just before Boko haram overran northern Adamawa and Baga. No wonder there was no close air support for our troops involved.
Whoever did this stuff has murdered sleep. They are responsible for treason simple and short.

It is true that GEJ's administration engaged in the most significant Arms haul, on the eve of the election, but out of the 2.2 billion USD, I dare say that less than 100 million USD was used by Dasuki to purchase used arms from eastern Europe.

The list has been published. 48 or so T-72 tanks @ $88,000 a piece and so on. The rest of the allotted cash was "shared" for "electioneering" among politicians.

So what gives ? How many Nigerian communities had to be destroyed for this ?

Nigeria failed to learn from it's setbacks in Liberia and sierra leone damn near 20+ years ago.

Insurgency tactics, and counterinsurgency strategies are not new. They have been perfected thru trial and error over the decades.

For conventional armies, they employ pincers maneauvers, to fix and then destroy opposing conventional forces.

The French in Algeria, the US in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan all demonstrated the use of helicopter mobile units to overcome inhospitable terrain, and blockade the escape roots of a highly mobile insurgent group before you attack them.

Some call it vertical envelopment, some call it Hammer and Anvil tactics. Point is don't continuously let the insurgents escape with their weapons, just to regroup and attack you at the time of their own choosing.

Nigeria made this mistake 20 yrs ago in ecomog, and we are repeating it today. We must invest in a fairly large number of helicopters to employ this strategy.

40 transport Mi-17 transport helicopters and 30 Mi-35M attack helicopters combined with these tactics will finish BHTs within a few months.

Nigeria already has the trained soldiers and special forces, but even they can't overcome the vast terrain that is the northeast. They already know of these tactics, but the government should stop thinking it can win this war on a shoe string budget.

In the past administration, these equipment were not delivered as a result of sadistic, treasonous corruption within and without our armed forces.
Now that our CIC is fighting corruption, we must do the needful when it comes to military acquisition and expenditure. For every naira you deprive our fighting forces, Boko Haram and other insurgencies will exact a million times that from the Nigerian society.

#FIND, #FIX, #DESTROY.

RIP to lt.col. Alli. And all the other brave soldiers.

Let's hope this was not related to an ATGM. NA should take seriously BHTs ability to upgrade. After all, they went from a can bomb hurling motorcycle gang that fire bombed police stations, to gun truck and rpg equipped force.
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Circa 2011 on beegeagles blog, I correctly predicted that would happen, and towns and bases will fall. The worst thing one can do, is to constantly underestimate your enemy.
Especially One that has dealt NA it's most humiliating military defeats.

So.we need to spend, and spend fast to further boost our advantages in the NE battle space.
The vaunted T72 tank that our late hero fought so valiantly in, was purchased in inexcusable small numbers. About 50 of the type was acquired by dasuki, who only used a fraction of the money that was allocated. It cost like $88,000 for the hurl. Does anyone think nigeria can't afford 500 of these tanks ?

Sudan just ordered 150 from russia's excess stock which numbers 20,000 tanks. Ethiopia and south Sudan purchased T72 tanks numbering 200 and 100 respectively in the recent past.

NA should buy these excess russian armament, then pay for them to be factory refurbished and upgraded.
This is the quickest and most effective way to ramp up numbers.
So if Bht acquires ATGMs, we Will be able to absorb the impact, and not be overwhelmed by it.?

Luckily, bht don't have a patron such as Iran. Their ATGMs have tormented Israeli tanks in Lebanon and occasionally in Gaza, and are currently tormenting the Saudi's in Yemen.
American/Saudi TOW missiles have in turn tormented Assads Iranian/Russian backed army.
Live footage of this abounds on YouTube.

In the same vein, Shekau has at least 2 MANPADs in his possession as seen in recent footage.

Say they have 10 of these, how long will it take to neutralize Operation Gama Aiki with it's paltry 3 alpha jets and 3 F7s ?

Gentlemen, I agree that BHTs have just been recouping, waiting for favorable weather to re launch their onslaught.

Our armed forces or at least our CIC and CAS are over confident of our victory, and I don't see what this confidence is based on.

Our air assets are still too anemic to arrest the situation. While ISR has improved, our air strike capabilities, air attack and air mobile assault abilities leave a whole lot to be desired.

NAF just needs basic assets to overwhelm BHTs, these assets are fairly cheap, but are somehow impossible to procure for our armed forces.

Case in point, NAF brass, have been yapping about Pakistani turbo prop trainer the super Mushshak for ages now.

Really, how long does it take a country with 2 full blown insurgencies, to expedite this sort of procurement ?

FYI, the PAK army has like 200+ of these birds, and their air force has about 120.

But it will take NAF 3 years to get just a paltry 10 of the said aircraft.


Same with the Mi-35Ms from Russia. These birds are being delivered expeditiously to combat zones world over, but ours will linger, till BHTs invade maidugri again.

OK in the last administrations some military brass committed treason, by sabotaging our arms purchasing with their sadistic corrupt practices.

But now under our incorruptible CIC, and our able CAS, WHAT THE HECK IS TAKING SO LONG ??


Hmmm, even the americans are telling NA to step up the pressure on the BHTs. And you know they know what they are taking about.

They may choose not to help us much, but they can see what obtains in that battle space.

Hi Henry 240, are you the same Henry from beef eagles blog ?
If so, remember I repeatedly accused our military brass and GEJ's admin of treason for this theft of defense funds.
I could tell they were doing this, as it happened.

But some other bloggers wanted our military brass to get due process 1st.

Well now we know who the thieves are, we must all line up behind president Buhari and fight these selfish and corrupt Nigerians, military or civilian once and for all.

Let's not pass up this opportunity.