Nigeria is experiencing a classic problem of pacification. If you spread out your forces to intercept and fight insurgents, your spread out forces are vulnerable to being overrun. If you mass your forces enough to defeat likely insurgent formations, your people are vulnerable to being attacked by insurgents because your forces are in fewer places.
Bad things happen when this problem exists:
The nation is in an uproar over an April 14th incident in the northeast (the Sambisa forest where the borders of Borno, Yobe and Adamwa states meet) where Boko Haram raided a boarding school for teenage girls and kidnapped over 200 students and some of the young women on the faculty. Fears that the captives, aged 16-18, would be used for sex and slave labor (around the camps) were apparently realized. ...
The public is appalled that such a large Boko Haram force, travelling in over a dozen vehicles, could attack the school and then raid several more villages while driving back to their forest hideouts and not be detected or intercepted by the security forces. As a practical matter the military is in a tough position. If they establish a lot of checkpoints in the northeast, in areas where Boko Haram is believed to have camps in the mountainous forests, Boko Haram can mass enough gunmen to attack these checkpoints with a fair chance of success. That means highly visible “defeats” for the army and a blow to morale because of the dead and wounded soldiers.
Early in the Iraq War, I spoke about this a lot. And I remained confident that eventually we could win because our enemies could not mass to pick off small outposts--even when they could inflict casualties from IEDs:
Over the last two years, I've said that we need to atomize the enemy in Iraq. As long as the enemy can mass in company-sized units, they can overrun police stations. If they can mass in platoon strength, they can wipe out road blocks and patrols.
If Iraqi patrols, road blocks, and police stations can't hold alone, it is more likely that more sophisticated forces with tanks and artillery and air power will be needed to fight the enemy. Right now, that's US forces.
Make it so that the enemy can only gather squads or fire teams, and low tech Iraqi light infantry and police can fight the enemy effectively. Iraqis can provide reaction teams to reinforce threatened Iraqi units.
When we left in 2011, the enemies in Iraq were atomized. Now? Without our help to keep these enemies down? Not so much. That's why the enemy is holding actual urban areas.
But back to the matter at hand. The Nigerians need to protect their people, of course. But the military has to survive, or all people all of the time will be vulnerable to such attacks.
So the military has to avoid repeated defeats that sap morale while using their military to chase, kill, and atomize the enemy so they have difficulty massing forces big enough to defeat small garrisons quickly. The Nigerians need to have communications and mobile reserves sufficient to reinforce those outposts under attack to hammer the Boko Haram thugs if they come out and expose themselves to Nigerian firepower.
