Nigeria’s worsening security crisis is, at its core, a story of military breakdown. The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) overran at least 15 military bases in 2025, captured and executed a brigadier general, and deployed armed drones that outmatched the defending units. The pattern of base overruns, mass desertions, and failure to reinforce troops under attack points to deep organizational failure.

Events like the February 2026 Kwara massacre, in which jihadists killed over 200 people as well as the December 2025 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on Nigerian soil and the deployment of American troops amount to the clearest sign yet that Africa’s most populous nation can no longer secure itself.

The Mosul Parallel

Iraq, before the fall of Mosul in 2014, offers the closest comparison. When 1,500 ISIS fighters routed 60,000 Iraqi soldiers, the collapse came not from lack of firepower but from corruption. The Iraqi military had roughly 50,000 ghost soldiers on its payroll, troops who existed only on paper so commanders could pocket their salaries. Nigeria faces the same problem. Leaked UK diplomatic cables found that of the 20,000 troops Nigeria claims to deploy in the northeast, the real number is significantly lower, with thousands of ghost soldiers generating salaries collected by officers. The corruption is not incidental; it is systemic. Transparency International gave Nigeria’s defense sector an ‘E’ rating for “very high” corruption risk.

The human cost falls on ordinary soldiers. A Nigerian private earns $31 to $38 per month. Soldiers spend three to five years deployed without rotation, creating conditions for mass desertion. Iraq’s military eventually reformed after Mosul through fingerprint-based troop verification and coalition mentoring, but that reform only happened because Mosul was a shock too large to ignore. Nigeria faces a harder problem, a slow bleed rather than a single catastrophe, which gives political leaders room to delay action indefinitely.

ISWAP’s Tactical Evolution and the Sahel Corridor

ISWAP’s 2025 “Camp Holocaust” campaign has been the most successful in the group’s history. ISWAP systematically destroyed forward operating bases across the Lake Chad Basin using drones, night-vision gear, and coordinated swarm attacks. The capture and execution of Brigadier General Musa Uba in November 2025 was not simply a battlefield loss. It revealed that ISWAP now operates with better intelligence than the forces it fights. ISWAP intercepted his communications and tracked his position after his convoy was ambushed 88 kilometers from regional military headquarters in Maiduguri. A force with 230,000 troops and a multibillion-dollar budget could not locate its own brigade commander.

The broader Sahel security framework has collapsed around Nigeria, and the timing could not be worse. Niger’s withdrawal from the Multinational Joint Task Force in March 2025 ended joint border patrols along a vast open frontier. Into this gap has moved Lakurawa, an Islamic State Sahel Province subgroup operating across Sokoto and Kebbi states with surveillance drones. Al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM launched its first recorded attack on Nigerian soil in 2025.

The Air Power Deficit

The Nigerian Air Force shows what happens when procurement runs ahead of maintenance capacity. Three JF-17 fighters from Pakistan were delivered in 2021. By May 2023, only one could still fly. The result is an air force that cannot protect civilians or support ground troops. SBM Intelligence estimates over 400 Nigerian civilians killed in erroneous military airstrikes between 2017 and 2025. The February 2026 Woro massacre showed what this means in practice. A military aircraft appeared overhead during a ten-hour attack that killed at least 162 civilians but did not engage.

External Partners and the Limits of Assistance

The United States launched 16 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Lakurawa camps in Sokoto State on Christmas Day 2025 and deployed troops to Bauchi Airfield. CSIS assessed that one-off strikes are unlikely to reduce the terrorist threat significantly. The pattern is familiar: outside firepower treats the symptoms while the underlying disease, institutional corruption, goes unaddressed. Nigeria’s own Defense Minister Christopher Musa has acknowledged that military action addresses only 30 percent of the conflict. The International Crisis Group’s 2016 reform blueprint called for fingerprint-based troop verification and open defense spending records. It remains unimplemented a decade later.

The Coup Question and the Criminal-Terror Nexus

Recent history across the Sahel makes this risk real. In Burkina Faso and Mali, troops who felt abandoned by civilian leaders seized power. Nigeria shows each of these warning signs. Soldiers earn $31 a month while generals oversee billions in unchecked spending. The Nigerian Armed Forces mostly ruled the country between 1966 and 1999, and the memory of military government has not faded.

A second risk deepens the picture. ISWAP brings in an estimated $191 million per year by taxing trade across the Lake Chad Basin, ten times what the Borno State government collects. Furthermore northwest bandit networks took in an estimated $1.42 billion in ransom in a single year.

Every overrun  base sends vehicles, weapons, and ammunition to ISWAP and other groups, fortifying their governance with economic and military assets. This is the critical danger: the longer reform is delayed, the more these groups entrench themselves as alternative governments with independent revenue. Once that happens, as Sudan’s civil war has shown, the window for reversing the trend narrows sharply.

Outlook

The 2026 Nigerian defense budget includes 5.41 trillion naira ($3.9 billion). However, 62 percent goes to personnel costs and the naira’s collapse has cut real spending power by two-thirds since 2023. Nigerian President Tinubu’s security emergency declaration has not changed the picture. At least 316 civilians were killed across 15 states in the 71 days that followed.

Three patterns deserve attention: the self-arming cycle, where weapons from overrun bases fuel the next attack; the intelligence gap, where ISWAP knows more about the military than the military knows about ISWAP; and the governing contest, where ISWAP’s services undercut public trust in the state. Until the corruption at the heart of Nigeria’s military is confronted, no amount of outside help will change the course. The question facing Abuja is whether reform comes through deliberate action or through the kind of devastating loss that forced Iraq’s hand after Mosul.

Arman Sidhu is an American geopolitical analyst and writer. He regularly covers the commodities market, international trade, and foreign investment. He is a regular contributor to Geopolitical Monitor and his work has previously appeared in The Diplomat, Eurasia Review, Economic & Political Weekly, and RealClearWorld, among several other outlets. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Hollow Ranks & Ghost Soldiers: Nigeria’s Corruption-Fueled Security Collapse was originally published on Global Security Review.

Amid U.S. involvement in a war against Iran, President Donald J. Trump has decided to double down on previous public expressions of disregard and distrust toward NATO. President Trump has threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO several times since his reelection. His repeated jibes at the alliance have raised concern among European defense experts and government officials. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder recently noted that “It’s hard to see how any European country will now be able and willing to trust the United States to come to its defense.” And French President Macron indicated on April 2nd that, in his view, U.S. President Trump was undermining NATO through his repeated threats to withdraw from the alliance. Raising new fears of American abandonment on the part of European leaders, Trump, in various interviews and social media posts within a few days, said that the United States “will remember” France’s refusal to assist in the war against Iran; that NATO was a “paper tiger”; and that “Putin knows that, too, by the way.”

The most recent Presidential broadsides against NATO reflected Trump’s frustration with European allies who chose not to involve themselves in the war against Iran and/or denied their political and military support for the actions taken under Operation EPIC FURY—an effort that Secretary of War, Hegseth describes as “laser-focused [to] destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure – and they will never have nuclear weapons.” But this hesitancy among European allies should not have surprised U.S. leadership. Neither NATO as an alliance nor individual European governments were consulted before the decision to go to war, nor were they fully informed until the operation was already in progress. Further to the issue of NATO support, Trump’s address to the nation on April 1st simply assumed that the United States would wind up its military operations within several weeks and would turn the problem of unblocking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz over to European countries and others. In addition, Western European governments have strong public support for putting distance between themselves and the war in Iran. Popular majorities in every country oppose the U.S. and Israeli campaign, and European opposition to the war is enhanced by Trump’s personal unpopularity on that side of the Atlantic.

An additional element in the split between Trump and NATO was the Russian interpretation of its implications for the war in Ukraine, and more broadly, for Russia’s national security strategy writ large. Prolonged U.S. commitment to war in the Middle East could deplete the availability of military assets that would otherwise be available to sustain Ukrainian forces in their fight against Russia. The global spike in gas and oil prices was an obvious boon to the Russian economy and, from the standpoint of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an unwelcome distraction for European leaders from the priority of supporting Ukraine. Russia also took advantage of Epic Fury to reinforce its support for Iran by providing targeting information for Iranian missile attacks against Israel and other regional states. Russia and Iran had already been sharing technology and knowledge with respect to drone warfare even prior to the launch of military operations against Tehran.

To some extent, the volatility in the Trump administration’s approach to NATO reflected the President’s frustration at his inability to broker a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Vladimir Putin viewed Russia’s war as existential and refused to acknowledge that there was any distinction between Ukrainian and Russian civilizations, let alone sovereignties. The Ukrainians responded in kind, resisting Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory with creative use of drone technology and edgy defensive strategizing that put at risk a variety of targets in Russian territory, including bomber bases and critical infrastructure. Worse for Putin, his invasion in 2022, preceded by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, refocused NATO on its primary mission of deterrence and defense in Europe as opposed to “out of the area” operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the formerly Cold War neutral states, Sweden and Finland, were added to NATO’s membership because of Russia’s attempted coup de main against Kiev that turned into the longest and most destructive war in Europe since World War II. Caught in a trap of his own making, Putin continued to pour troops and material into the battlefields of Donbas and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to support a more favorable negotiating position, should productive negotiations ever materialize.

Given Trump’s propensity for rearranging the deck chairs on foreign policy via Truth Social memoranda, it is conceivable that he will tone down the anti–NATO rhetoric once he has decided on a strategy for winding down the U.S. military campaign in Iran. The process of deconflicting the Strait of Hormuz will likely involve participation from European nations and other countries. Almost nobody benefits from continued bottlenecks in global shipping of oil and other vital commodities. Regardless of the outcome in Iran, the United States needs NATO, and NATO needs the United States. Without the U.S. as the indispensable leading partner, NATO Europe has insufficient nuclear or conventional deterrence against further Russian aggression. This assertion implies no disregard for the steps that the U.S. European allies have already taken since 2022 to improve the quality of their armed forces and military–industrial complexes. It is instead a recognition that the unique American nuclear deterrent and conventional war-fighting capabilities, supported by European determination to resist further Russian aggression, create a global as well as a regional deterrent for Russia and its partners (The CRINKs – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) that benefits not only NATO but also world peace. On the other hand, a divided and internally fractious NATO invites further aggression within and beyond Europe.

Stephen J. Cimbala is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State Brandywine and the author of numerous works on nuclear deterrence, arms control, and military strategy. He is a senior fellow at NIDS and a recent contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies edited by Dr. Alexander Hill (Routledge: 2025). The views of the author are his own.

Trumping NATO was originally published on Global Security Review.

The incoming administration may prefer a blend of hard power and transactional diplomacy. An exit strategy for Ukraine and Russia is for both to come across as winners through conflict resolution.

A Russian maximalist position would require Ukraine to lose on all fronts. This means no return of territory; no European Union (EU) or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership. In theory, Russia needs to be incentivized to either give back the territories, and/or allow Ukraine to join NATO and the EU. The latter, however, is the least likely since it was Western encroachment on Russian borders and Ukrainian efforts to join Western organizations that served as Russian justification for their aggression.

In reality, Russia will never return Crimea to Ukraine. Crimean history, for Russia, is a bloody struggle against the Ottomans, making Crimea important to Russian pride.

The normal EU or NATO accession process takes years or decades. Expediting Ukraine’s accession to either will only reinforce Russian fears that the West is attempting to encircle Russia.

Ukraine’s reconstruction represents a serious economic challenge for the West. The United Nations currently estimates the cost of reconstruction at $486 billion. Who will pay for that reconstruction may play a large role in any negotiations.

Previous public statements by Western officials calling for the expedited membership of Ukraine in NATO only provokes Russian recalcitrance, which will be a challenge for Donald Trump to overcome. With Finland and Sweden now part of NATO, the Baltic Sea is a NATO lake that is closed to Russian naval assets. Ukraine in NATO will threaten Russia’s warm-water ports.

Ukraine in NATO is a non-starter for Russia. Keeping Crimea is an important part of ensuring Russian security. An acceptable compromise will require both sides to walk away unhappy while claiming victory. Ukraine may have to accept the loss of Crimea and the Donbass. It may also require an agreement to forgo joining NATO and, likely, the EU. Russian troops will end their aggression against Ukraine and leave. Western states will likely have the unenviable task of rebuilding Ukraine.

The Biden administration’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike Russia with American weapons is not sustainable in the long run, making it difficult for Ukraine to coerce Russia into a “good deal” in any peace talk. Public opinion in Ukraine supports ending the war short of victory. Ukrainians just want the war to end.

The endgame for Ukraine does not stop at Ukraine’s border. The Trump administration is expected to also play a role in protecting NATO member-states near Russia from further aggression. Appearing too weak empowers Russian aggression, while imposing unrealistic conditions will not end the war.

The exact conditions of any deal are certain to include elements that are not strictly related to the conflict’s settlement. For example, European states may agree to purchase American natural gas instead of Russian natural gas. European NATO member-states may also be required to pay for reconstruction.

A return to the purchase of Russian natural gas, Russia’s biggest export to Europe, may serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations, it is easily conceivable that a Trump administration will want payback for previous American support. This may include a much larger position on Europe’s energy and other markets.

Germany, which is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, will care deeply about such negotiations. Lifting sanctions will be important for Russia and Europe.

The brave new world that is the future of Europe may stand somewhere between a new NATO versus Russia bipolarity and balkanization. Some countries may attempt to play all sides involved. Deterrence may still hold, but European NATO must certainly rearm.

Across NATO, there is an effort already underway to learn the lessons of the Ukraine war. Any endgame must ensure the West is far more effective at making sense of those lessons than are China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Developments in cyber, space, drone, and missile warfare are all critical elements of post-war learning.

For the sake of the Ukrainian people, it is time to end this conflict. But it must be done in a way that protects the future of Ukraine while understanding Russian fears. Rightly, Russian President Vladimir Putin deserves the disdain of the free world. Absent the ability to impose a clear victory on Russia, which is a challenge given Russian nuclear arms, a negotiated settlement is the only viable option.

Christophe Bosquillon is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. He has over 30 years of international experience in general management, foreign direct investment, and private equity and fund management across various industries in Europe and the Pacific Basin. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

An Endgame in Ukraine was originally published on Global Security Review.