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.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Defense (DoD) appears to be doing the opposite. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) recently axed its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate, a move many analysts view as strategic self-sabotage.

This directorate, responsible for overseeing more than $340 million in AI and digital integrations in fiscal year 2024, represented a critical nexus linking battlefield innovations with institutional infrastructure. Its elimination, justified under “efficiency” mandates, alarmed defense observers who fear it fractures continuity, erases institutional memory, and sends a dangerous signal to adversaries willing to exploit perceived American weakness.

The Strategic Misstep

The CDAO was formed in 2022 by fusing key functions from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service, Chief Data Office, and Advana analytics, aiming to unify policy, technology, and digital services. Embedded within CDAO, the CTO led cross-functional teams in AI, cyber, logistics, and command-and-control systems, ensuring that new technologies remained interoperable and aligned with warfighter requirements.

Abruptly dismantling this directorate not only removes a pivotal vision and coordination role but also creates a void with no clear replacement. The result is fragmented efforts, lost synergy across mission areas, and a battlefield advantage handed to adversaries.

Expertise Lost, Momentum Undermined

Leadership and expertise take years, even decades, to develop. Figures like Bill Streilein, former CTO of CDAO and veteran of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, carried institutional memory and high standards into Pentagon AI programs. But when top-tier professionals are sidelined under the label of “streamlining,” they often leave and seldom return.

This pattern has already occurred. The Defense Digital Service (DDS), once lauded as the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” lost almost all of its members by May 2025, prompting its demise. Nearly every DDS member, citing bureaucratic pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chose to depart rather than conform.

These departures are not benign transfers. They represent the scattering of core innovators and connectors whose insight and trust networks are irreplaceable. Without them, emerging AI systems risk becoming siloed projects rather than battlefield-enabling capabilities.

DOGE: Efficiency or Engineered Evisceration?

DOGE, instituted by a presidential executive order in January 2025, is authorized to slash perceived inefficiencies across federal agencies—often through AI-enhanced, automated assessments. Under the leadership of figures tied to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE has repurposed its mandate to aggressively target leadership and innovation roles across the board—including in national defense.

DOGE has justified cuts using its proprietary AI systems to flag and eliminate “inefficient” programs, often without human oversight or contextual nuance. The CTO’s directorate was among its most high-profile targets, methodically identified and removed, despite its mission-critical nature.

To make matters worse, DOGE is reportedly comfortable with these decisions. One Pentagon official described it as a “theater of dominance,” not just cost-cutting, but deliberate erasure of institutional anchors to obfuscate the depth and breadth of the sacrifice.

The High-Stakes Fallout

Adversaries feast on the narrative that the US champions AI yet purges its own tech leadership overnight. “America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare,” such narratives go. These optics weaken American deterrence, erode allied confidence, and provide cover for Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang to reframe the battlefield narrative.

Domestic consequences are equally grim. The consistent removal of flagship tech roles projects a clear message to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals; serve, and risk being discarded. That weakness is a recruitment boon for adversaries, national lab contractors, and tech-armed autocracies solving tomorrow’s warfare puzzles.

Real efficiencies lie not in gutting leadership but in fortifying it. Per the National Security Commission on AI, prioritizing disciplined recruitment and retention of technical talent, including a Digital Corps and AI fellowships, is key to American competitiveness. Instead, we witness the dismantling of precisely those anchor roles meant to shepherd AI innovation into combat-relevant systems.

The DOGE-Driven Dismantling of Tech Leadership

The concepts herein are alarming and reflect an institutional unraveling that directly undermines America’s global security posture and strategic deterrence in five critical ways. First, the elimination of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) strips away a core pillar of the Pentagon’s ability to adapt emerging technologies for battlefield advantage. This directorate was not redundant bureaucracy; it was the crucible in which ideas from national labs, industry, and warfighters were harmonized into operational capability.

By abruptly dismantling this team, the Department of Defense has extinguished a pipeline of institutional memory and strategic insight at the precise moment when rapid, informed, and integrated decision-making is needed. This brain drain parallels a historical pattern of self-sabotage and leaves adversaries uncontested in the tech talent race.

Second, the removal of high-level AI leadership is a propaganda gift to revisionist powers like China and Russia. These states are watching America voluntarily decapitate its own strategic leadership, an act they can now frame as proof of American decline. This strengthens their strategic messaging in influence campaigns aimed at allies, neutral states, and even American citizens.

“America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare” is not just a phrase, it is a weaponized narrative that demoralizes partners and emboldens adversaries to challenge American dominance in contested domains like cyberspace, space, and AI warfare.

Third, strategic deterrence hinges on credible capability and the perception of cohesion. DOGE’s algorithmic-driven targeting of leadership roles without contextual assessment introduces chaos into the acquisition and integration life cycle of military AI systems. Instead of creating synergistic effects across logistics, cyber, and command and control, the US risks building a fractured, siloed ecosystem that fails in joint operations.

By removing the very leaders who prevent stove piping, the US sabotages its ability to develop and field interoperable, scalable, and warfighter-ready AI tools. This systemic breakdown makes deterrence brittle, vulnerable to being cracked in future high-end conflicts.

Fourth, the US has struggled to compete with the private sector for AI and cybersecurity talent. By signaling that even elite government technologists are disposable under the guise of “efficiency,” this policy drives future talent away from public service. Those who might have joined a modern “Digital Corps” will instead seek stability and respect elsewhere, perhaps even abroad.

Strategic deterrence depends not only on weapons but on technologists who know how to deploy them. Gutting these roles ensures that tomorrow’s innovations will not make it past the lab, let alone onto the battlefield.

Fifth, DOGE’s use of automated assessments to eliminate “inefficiencies” without human oversight is a grotesque parody of reform. Its reliance on cold, context-blind algorithms to purge critical roles mimics adversary models of techno-authoritarianism, not democratic accountability. If allowed to continue, this will hollow out innovation across government agencies and military branches.

Efficiency is not the enemy, misapplied efficiency is. Strategic deterrence requires smart investments, not cost-cutting theater that sacrifices our warfighting edge on the altar of political optics.

Strategic Self-Sabotage Must Be Reversed

This is not merely streamlining, it is full-blown surrender. The dismantling of the CDAO’s CTO directorate and the broader DOGE initiative represents an engineered unraveling of the very leadership needed to project U.S. strategic deterrence in the AI era. Leadership is the vector through which technology becomes capability. Remove it, and you hand your adversaries not only the advantage, but the narrative.

Unless reversed, these concepts and actions will echo through wargames, deterrence failures, and battlefield losses. The US must stop cannibalizing its competitive edge and re-center its national security strategy on strengthening, not sidelining, its AI leadership.

Conclusion

Leadership is not just overhead on the funding spreadsheet; these leaders are our ammunition in the fight for global AI dominance. Removing them during a strategic inflection point is not reform, it is a self-made vulnerability, and as the US disables its own leadership of advanced technologies, it is dismantling future readiness.

The nation must insist on accountability. Cost-cutting means nothing if it costs the technological coherence to compete in tomorrow’s battles. In the strategic competition unfolding now, leadership is the weapon, and ceding it is surrender. This page out of the DOGE handbook should be shredded and burned. Remember, Iranian nuclear scientists were not dismantled by their own regime, they were destroyed by US and Israeli bombs.

Greg Sharpe is Marketing Director at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. He is retired from the US Air Force. The views expressed are his own.

The Quiet Dismantling of America’s AI Warfighting Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.