Retired Air Force officer and seasoned military fighter pilot Air Commodore Balogun Abayomi has lamented over what he described as the steady erosion of the Nigerian Armed Forces’ operational capacity in the fight against insurgency.
Speaking in an interview from 2:51 with Arise TV, he said, “I’m in disbelief to see that the armed forces I served in is today handicapped in a lot of ways. But I still believe that despite the handicap, we can still overcome if we choose to do the right thing at the right time. Because for me, right now, we are reactive. For a while, we have been reactive. We have not been proactive,” he said.
The Retired Military officer stated that the path to turning the tide lay in shifting to intelligence-driven operations that allowed the military to anticipate and neutralise threats before they materialised.
He argued that genuine proactive warfare meant knowing the enemy, understanding their intentions, and mapping their likely courses of action so that preventive and preemptive measures could be taken before any attack was launched.
In his assessment, the current approach was the exact opposite: the military was allowing insurgents to plan freely, gather in numbers, and strike first and only responding after lives had already been lost. Read_More…