Abdullahi M. Gulloma
President Muhammadu Buhari has commended the leadership of the Nigerian military for the intellectual transformation of the officer corps. The President spoke, recently, while decorating some newly promoted officers including the Commander of the Presidential Air Fleet (PAF), Air Vice Marshal Sadiq Ismaila Kaita, and his Aide-De-Camp (ADC), Colonel Mohammed Lawal Abubakar, at the State House in Abuja.
The President said that modern armies require superiority of intellect and imagination to achieve victory in warfare. He expressed his happiness with the array of university degrees soldiers now brandish, urging them to translate their academic achievements to concrete performance in their place of assignment.
“I am happy with the intellectual approach of the military,” the President said. “In our time, there was no time for academic pursuit. It was all about war, coup and counter-coup.”
The President advised that in times of peace and stability, military officers should pursue their intellectual goals and ensure transformation of hardware to meet modern standards.
He specifically urged officers to read history, irrespective of their academic background, describing it as an important pre-requisite for strategic learning and success in the military.
Like Buhari, many have rightly said that history is the best teacher of mankind. With sound knowledge of history, all military problems can be addressed from an intellectual point and satisfactorily to the benefit of peace and mankind, thereby evading wars.
This is not to say that other disciplines are not crucial to the success of modern military. In fact, without science and technology, the art of warfare would remain unsophisticated and barbaric as it was around the 16th century.
History, by its nature, interprets other disciplines in a way that it ends up serving as a conduit to connecting knowledge of the past and present and predicts the future of not only military hardware but strategic global trends and events.
Strategic thinking and action, basically, are what the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces demands from the military, and they must do that to be relevant in this century.
