The most pressing tragedy confronting Nigeria today is not merely insecurity; it is the frightening theatricality with which the Senate believes crises can be resolved by multiplying boots without multiplying brains. The proposal to expand our armed forces from 10,000 soldiers to an astronomical 100,000 is the loudest confession of strategic emptiness in the corridors of power. It is the clearest sign that Nigeria is drifting toward a primitive philosophy of war; where muscle is worshipped and intelligence is abandoned, where numbers are mistaken for victory, and where fear governs policy more than foresight.
At the heart of this national miscalculation lies the myth that war is won through mass recruitment. It is the same archaic imagination that collapsed empires from Mesopotamia to Mali. You do not defeat the darkness by adding shadows. You do not conquer terror by enlarging the crowd of frightened men holding rifles. Nations triumph by thinking, not swelling. Barack Obama: whatever one’s disagreements with his politics understood something Nigeria keeps refusing to understand: conflict is defeated by strategy, not population. His doctrine of smart power proved that the battlefield is shaped by intelligence, by coalitions, by diplomacy, by economic levers, and by precision not by flooding valleys with uniformed men who lack equipment, morale, welfare, or direction.
Nigeria is repeating the oldest error of failing states: building an army without building a nation. We are attempting to recruit thousands soldiers into a system that cannot yet feed the few it has, cannot equip them, cannot protect them, cannot supervise them, and cannot even account for them. It is a proposal that runs on political optics rather than national logic. The Senate’s martial enthusiasm ignores the truth every strategist knows: an army multiplies chaos when its growth is not matched by coherence. A million underpaid, undertrained, and undisciplined soldiers is not a weapon; it is a social bomb waiting to explode in the streets.
Obama’s philosophy dismantles the Senate’s fantasy effortlessly. He defeated complex insurgencies without swelling the military to medieval proportions. He dismantled terror networks through a “light footprint,” using special forces, intelligence fusion, drones, coalition partnerships, and surgical precision. He drained the lifeblood of extremist groups by cutting off their finances, stalking their digital footprints, and empowering local forces to defend their soil. He understood that a nation does not conquer conflict by multiplying battalions but by shrinking the oxygen of violence—through diplomacy, through multilateralism, through intelligence superiority. It was this triangulation of diplomacy, technology, and coalition-building that crushed ISIS without the United States sinking into another Iraq-style quagmire.
Nigeria needs that doctrine now more than ever. Our insecurity is not a military shortage problem; it is a governance deficit. It is a poverty epidemic. It is an intelligence failure. It is political negligence wearing military camouflage. Banditry thrives because our borders are porous, our policing system is archaic, our rural intelligence networks are comatose, and our leaders mistake press conferences for solutions. Terrorists are not multiplying because Nigeria lacks men—it is because Nigeria lacks method. We remain a nation where a handful of gunmen can walk through villages for hours without confrontation because the state’s response mechanism is slower than the tragedy it is supposed to prevent.
Recruiting one hundred thousands to one million soldiers is a seductive illusion; the type of national fantasy that makes politicians look tough while making the country weaker. It will bankrupt the treasury, destabilize communities, escalate human-rights abuses, deepen corruption, and militarize a fragile nation. Worse, it will distract us from the real war: the war against hunger, unemployment, extremist ideology, banditry financing, and political sabotage. A hundred thousand soldiers cannot win a war in a country where the political class is still feeding the embers of conflict.
Nigeria must abandon the Senate’s war-drunk expansion and embrace Obama’s smarter, sharper, cleaner doctrine, that is the doctrine that recognizes that every modern conflict is multidimensional and cannot be defeated by manpower alone. What we need is a lean, elite, well-equipped force backed by sophisticated intelligence systems, satellite surveillance, cyber units, economic sanctions against terror financiers, regional alliances, and diplomatic offensives. We need a policing revolution, community-based intelligence, and a holistic counter-extremism strategy that targets the ideology behind the gun, not the gun alone.
The Senate must understand that nations do not survive by intimidating the future with numbers. They survive by designing the future with wisdom. Nigeria is standing at the intersection between illusion and intelligence. One road leads to a million soldiers marching into deeper chaos; the other leads to a smarter doctrine where fewer men, guided by clarity, defeat the storms gathering around the republic.
The choice is ours, but the consequences will not be merciful.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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