From Iheanacho Nwosu,Abuja
Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Abubakar Sadique in this interview xrayed the performance of the Air Force especially in the fight against insurgency in recent times. He disclosed how the force has been overcoming its plethora of challenges explaining that its Research and Development (R&D) division has done tremendously well. He spoke on other key issues.
Winning Hearts and Minds
Winning hearts and mind is very important in any counter – insurgency operation. If you go into history, the French in Algeria and even in recent history of United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is very important if you really want to succeed, that you get intelligence. How can you get intelligence if you don’t win the confidence of the people? No matter how sophisticated your Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft might be, you cannot succeed unless you work closely with the people in the local community.
How can you use an ISR platform to locate a thirteen year old girl who is carrying explosives? How do you know if she is heading for the market or the mosque? It is impossible. There is no aircraft that can pick that information. The only way you can get that information is from the community. This girl lives in somebody’s house; this girl was armed in another location; she must have been invited by someone. Who invited her? You can only get answers to these questions if you are working with people in the community. They have the information but the only way they can come close to you not to talk of giving you the information is if they know that they have a stake in what you are doing.
If something happens and you just open fire and kill everybody, there is no way anybody will come to you and give you any information about what happened there. In fact, the community will now be divided between Boko Haram and the security forces. So, winning hearts and mind is really helping us, especially if you treat women and children, you will get a lot of intelligence.
Research and Development
I was in charge of R&D before I became Chief of Air Staff. I was Chief of Standards and Evaluation in the Airforce. I was the one, under the leadership of the former Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, that initiated the partnership between the NAF and the universities including the Diaphorm programme for helicopter gunships. So, I was pretty in the picture of what was happening and honestly, we must salute the Nigerian universities. There are highly dedicated and patriotic lecturers in our universities. All you need do is call them, talk to them and they will embrace a good project. I think that that sense of patriotism and commitment, if tapped properly can address a lot of our challenges.
The problem is that there are no linkages. You find a university man who is working alone and other public research institutes are also on their own. So, some of these R&D ideas were there. Like the prototype UAV was developed in 2013; what I am trying to do is to operationalise it and which we have reached an advanced stage.
Boko Haram’s latest video
Yes. This is cheap propaganda. Even the IEDs that they developed, have you ever seen a complete body together after it has been detonated at any location? That is the crudest form of bomb but when you go there after an explosion, you don’t see anything. Not to talk of a 250kg bomb. What they use for the IEDs, how many kilogrammes are we talking about? It is so insignificant. If you look at the clip, they positioned the girls there. Somebody even told me that he saw one of the girls even moving her head.
All I can tell you is that just looking at the way they did it, you can clearly see that it couldn’t have been something that happened after an air strike.
If you drop a bomb, there will be a crater. Where is the crater? If you drop a bomb, within certain meters radius of the point of impact, everybody there will be gone. In most cases, they will be shredded depending on the type of bomb, where it is dropped and the kind of configuration you used in doing the bombing. But if you now neatly arrange people and say these people were killed by air strike, it doesn’t make sense at all.
Let people ask themselves: you have seen IED explosions, have you ever seen people killed and arranged neatly like that?
So, these guys are just trying to whip up sentiments because they know that every Nigerian is concerned about those girls. I have daughters and sometimes when I look at my daughters, I remember those girls.
There is no day that the sun rises and sets that we don’t go out hoping to see these girls. From January this year to August 17, we flew about 2,600 hours and about 50 percent of our mission was on ISR (Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance). Why do we do that? It is because we are hoping that maybe through that intelligence, we might be able to capture the movement of the girls. Maybe, through that intelligence, we might be able to locate what we consider legitimate targets.
Collateral Damage
There is no military operation without collateral damage. We are trying within available resources to try and understand the terrain called Sambisa Forest and we are able to determine what is key intimate target to be attacked. We don’t just go out to attack civilians. Like I said, counter- insurgency is about wining hearts and mind.
The thing at the back of our heads is to look out for the criminals. How do we do that? By deploying our ISR platforms; in the past we used to have only two but with the coming of the present administration, we now have about five. Very soon, we are going to acquire one that can remain in the air for 33 hours with cameras looking everywhere. That is why I keep telling these criminals that they cannot escape. The time for you to escape is almost over.
So the girls have nothing to do with air strike. After an air strike, you will not see things like that the way they displayed them in their video. Maybe because they are used to fighting on land, they don’t know about air battle. So, they think that they can drop anything and it will make sense. No. It doesn’t work that way.
Resources
When we came in, we were given some intervention funds. What we are simply doing is to prudently manage whatever is available.
Sambisa Forest
Sambisa Forest is about 60,000 square kilometers. It extends even into Cameron and that is why sometimes in the past, these terrorists could do whatever they liked and then sneak into Cameron. But now, Cameron is also hot for them. You can see the difficulty involved in ensuring that we cover every square inch of that forest.
We still fly over Sambisa Forest on a regular basis but you see, there are issues with the terrain. The terrain is very difficult especially during the rainy season and the use of ground forces. I am sure you can discuss some of these issues with the Chief of Army Staff. There are so many challenges for ground troops, but for us in the Air Force, we are not limited by terrain. We just fly over the place and we can see what is happening.