The Nigerian Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja, has charged senior officers of the service to make the military proud positively by justifying the investment in training given to them professionally.
The Army Chief made this known during the graduation ceremony of the 36 senior participants of the Leadership and Strategic Studies Course 2, 2023 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
He said that ‘the Nigerian Army in recent years, made a deliberate effort to significantly increase its investments in developing operational and strategic level leaders required to think out of the box and interrogate issues sufficiently and objectively to make informed decisions.
‘Moreover, the political and economic reality of present-day Nigeria requires senior leaders to be ingenious in employing available resources – human and material, to fulfill operational objectives,’ he said.
According to him, Economics 101 taught them that human wants are unlimited, but the resources are finite.
This basic economic co
ncept equally applies to military operations because you will not always have sufficient measures in terms of human and material resources.
He stressed that any gap in their understanding of how the Nigerian Army as a system functions within and relates with other systems in the larger Nigeria system is a recipe for operational disaster, which will be unacceptable to the Nigerian people.
According to him, the Leadership and Strategic Studies Course is a senior-level programme designed to give the Direct Regular Commission officers, and others found suitable to undertake the course, a mirror of what their Regular Combatant colleagues go through at the National Defence College.
‘As the name suggests, it is a strategic level programme that accustomed participants to policy and strategy formulation at the lower strata of the military strategic level,’ he said.
He noted that the programme gives participants an understanding of issues at the grand strategic level and how senior leaders in the Armed Forces inter
pret policies to formulate military strategy.
Thus, the experience of the past 11 months is expected to have enhanced the participants’ capacity in policy analysis, argumentation, and evaluation and provided them with advanced functional and robust research skills in leadership and strategic studies, amongst others.
The Director General of the Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Major General Garba Wahab (Rtd) said that ‘there has been wonderful feedback after the second series of the course.’
The Director commended the participants for putting in efforts to master the course.
He urged the participants to have an open mind to relate with everybody including the locals to be able to tackle security challenges as security is everybody’s business.
According to him, they operate in a joint environment where the military, all government agencies, Civil Society organizations, and others are operating because everybody is clamoring for the adoption of the whole societal approach to solving security problems.
He sai
d it is constructive where people are allowed to say their minds to bridge the gap of trust when they sit together.
He charged them to believe in themselves and know their responsibilities no matter the situation.
Source: Voice of Nigeria