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…to operate Computer based Weapons Systems soon.
By Kingsley Omonobi-Abuja.
In compliance with the directives of President Buhari to the Service Chiefs’ to step up their game and bring rising insecurity to a halt, Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Yusuf Buratai has approved the establishment of the Nigerian Army Cyber Warfare Command.

Military sources told Vanguard that the highly technical Command would be initially composed of 150 ICT specially trained officers and men drawn from all the Corps and Services in the Nigerian Army.

The Command as gathered; is charged with the responsibility to monitor, defend and attack subversive elements in the cyberspace.

“The Headquarters of the Cyber Warfare Command would be in Abuja even as it would also have other units in each of the geo-political zones” a source said adding that “It is the first of its kind in Africa”.

It would be recall that Lt. General Buratai at a press briefing last November 2016, posited that the 5th generation of warfare is Information Warfare and that he would set up a virtual command to monitor the activities of Boko Haram Terrorists in cyberspace.

Vanguard gathered that towards a successful assault on cyberspace criminals and terrorists, the army has acquired state of the art technical equipment, servers have been procured and experts from IBM are currently configuring them to meet the needs of the Nigerian Army to track monitor and carry out ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ to criminals, terrorist and subversive elements.

The command would also monitor the Nigerian Army’s networks and advise Field Commanders on how to use the newly procured computer based weapons systems recently inducted to the Theatre of Operations.

The source said the Command would also have capacity to protect the Nations Critical Infrastructure.

Towards higher capacity building, the source said, “Plans have been concluded to send officers and soldiers of the command to attend various courses in Countries like US, Russia and the UK.

The source emphasized that, “With the establishment of the Command the fight against terror, insurgency, armed banditry, pipeline vandalism, herdsmen and militia killings would be checkmated since real-time information would be provided to the fighting forces and commanders in the field from the highly sophisticated equipment already procured.”