The Nigerian Army has organised a five–day Retreat for past field Commanders in the On–going Counter–Terrorism and Counter–Insurgency operations in the North East. The event which took place recently at the Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Abuja was aimed at retrieving useful and valuable information from retired and serving commanders who had served in the field by way of sharing their operational experiences and challenges while serving in the North East.
Declaring the retreat open, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lt Gen Tukur Buratai urged participants to be focused and make maximum use of the opportunity provided by the Retreat to articulate their experiences, challenges, opinions with a view to making recommendations for future Nigerian Army CTCOIN operations.
Gen Buratai stated that the contemporary security challenges being experienced in the nation require intensive collaboration and ideology and this can only be achieved by interaction with commanders who have been in the field. He further stated that the retreat is important because asymmetric warfare has become defining feature of 21st Century security challenges that the Nigerian Army will be contending with.
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The COAS said Nigerian Army would continue to reshape its modalities and scope of war through acquisition of new skills and strategies, which could only be achieved through a robust and continues training and retraining. However, he congratulated all past and present Commanders for their leadership steadfastness that saw to the degradation of the Boko Haram Terrorists capability and restoration of relative peace and stability to the North East.
He reiterated that what informed his Directive for the Retreat is the need to share experiences, particularly, to identify operational, command, leadership and logistics challenges of the various field Commanders for an effective and efficient future CTCOIN engagements by the NA.
Earlier, the Director General, Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Maj Gen Johnny Hamakim stated that the Retreat had the objective of identifying and understanding Command and leadership challenges encountered by the Commanders in the course of executing their duties as well as articulating lessons learnt.
According to him, this makes the retreat a very veritable avenue to review the current CTCOIN operations in the North East to chat a way forward in the light of the challenges and successes recorded for future CTCOIN engagements by the NA. The Director General stated it will also enable participants to suggest best response and implementation strategies to tackle terrorism and insurgency in the country.
