Victory with Honour: A Memoir of My Command Experience Onboard Nigerian Navy Ship Okpabana.

By Olusegun Ferreira

Victory with Honour, is an account of my stewardship whilst I was onboard NNS OKPABANA as the Commanding Officer from 2015 – 2016. The book renders a chronological narrative of my operational and command experience onboard the ship beginning with an opening chapter giving an exposé on the essence of sea power and the concept of navies, a brief historical perspective of the NN in the second, and the third chapter begins with my own story. In between, I also gave my view of the maritime security situation in the Gulf of Guinea and how to address the challenges being experienced therein. The book then continues with a personal account of the various exercises and operations that the ship participated in whilst I was in command. Chapter Eighteen being the last chapter gave some leadership principles, though navy-centric, could apply to almost any sphere of life.

Largely esoteric in nature, I believe the readership would be inspired to draw lessons from my experiences and also add to the corporate/institutional knowledge of the Nigerian Navy as a whole. I also believe more needs to be laid out in the public space on how Nigeria as a maritime nation, has potentials to become a sea power state like other nations with access to the seas did in the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781728355580

Olusegun Ferreira

Olusegun Ferreira is Commodore in the Nigerian Navy (NN) who has served the nation since 1993 as a Seaman/Executive Officer upon graduation from the Nigerian Defence Academy as a gentleman officer in the Armed Forces of Nigeria. The author has been involved in operations at sea and has also served onboard various classes of ships until he qualified as a helicopter pilot and got involved in air operations, both seaborne and shore based. He has also attended a number of military courses including the National Defence College Course, which prepares military officers for strategic level appointments and higher defence management functions. Commodore Ferreira has also had command of both the Naval Air Base and NNS OKPABANA, a Nigerian Navy frigate which was his last appointment until he was designated as Nigeria’s Defence Adviser to the Nigerian High Commission in New Delhi with concurrent accreditation to 6 other countries; Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Singapore and South Korea. The author is an experienced seaman who has put together his command and operational experience whilst in command of NNS OKPABANA culminating in the publishing of this book, “Victory with Honour”. Olusegun is also an alumnus of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Coventry University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. – my photograph below

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© 2021 Olusegun FerreiraAll rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-7283-5559-7 (sc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021901118

Published by AuthorHouse 06/03/2021

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 The Concept of Navies and the Essence of Seapower

Chapter 2 The Nigerian Navy—Origin, Growth, and Statutory Roles

Chapter 3 Appointment On board

Chapter 4 A New CO, A New Command

Chapter 5 Nigerian Navy Ship OKPABANA

Chapter 6 Exercise Treasure Guard

Chapter 7 The Maximus Affair

Chapter 8 Exercise Obangame Saharan Express

Chapter 9 Operation Tsare Teku I

Chapter 10 Maritime Security in the Gulf of Guinea—An Appraisal

Chapter 11 Exercise Opia Toha

Chapter 12 Exercise NEMO

Chapter 13 Operation Tsare Teku II

Chapter 14 Shipborne Helicopter Operations

Chapter 15 Operation Tsare Teku III

Chapter 16 Another New Command

Chapter 17 Honours and Awards

Chapter 18 Last Words on Command

Epilogue

Victory with Honour

Olusegun Ferreira

Commanding Officer, NNS OKPABANA

November 2015–October 2016

Human beings come in three kinds; the living, the dead and those who go to sea.

—Aristotle

To all who have served and defended Nigeria from the seas.

Acknowledgements

A work of this nature deserves a mention of all who have contributed in one way or another to its fruition. First and foremost, I wish to thank Vice Admiral IE Ibas, the 22nd Chief of the Naval Staff, Nigerian Navy, for giving me an opportunity to serve as commanding officer of Nigerian Navy Ship OKPABANA as well as granting approval for the book to be published in the first instance.

I also wish to thank Air Vice Marshal MS Usman, the Chief of Defence Intelligence, for facilitating the process leading up to the approval of the CNS for the publishing of this book.

I particularly want to recognise the contributions of Mr Adebayo Olowo-Ake for his forthright appraisal and lucid inputs whilst the manuscript was being finalized. With deep appreciation, I acknowledge the very objective reviews and guidance offered by Rear Admiral IO Mohammed and Rear Admiral AO Adaji in the final stages of the book.

My gratitude also goes to Rear Admiral PC Nwatu and Lieutenant Commander Murphy Bozegha for the roles they each played in the realisation of this work.

Importantly, I wish to thank my wife, Tamai, for her unrelenting support and unbiased reviews and observations from the start to the end of this book.

Finally, I acknowledge the contributions by other members of my family throughout the period the book was put together.

Thank you all.

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Foreword

Navies, the world over, are known to play strategic roles in the ascent of nations towards maritime dominance, especially for littoral states whose wealth and resources come from the seas. Indeed, the Nigerian Navy has creditably performed her constitutional duty of protecting Nigeria’s territorial integrity right from its inception in 1956 to her contributions during the Nigerian Civil War, as well as her active roles in support of ECOWAS peace support initiatives in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the ECOMOG Operations and more recently in Operation Restore Democracy in The Gambia. To date, the Nigerian Navy remains a key actor in the enforcement of security in Nigeria’s maritime areas of immediate and extended interests.

The projection of force, balance of power, and diplomacy are some of the contemporary functions common to navies, and these are primarily executed through the deployment of surface assets or warships in furtherance of strategic objectives of nations. Special trust is therefore emplaced in officers who have been appointed to command these national assets in the accomplishment of assigned tasks and the operational objectives of the Nigerian Navy.

It is in this regard that I believe Commodore Olusegun Ferreira has deemed it necessary to publish this book, Victory with Honour, which is an account of his stewardship whilst in command of NNS OKPABANA. While commending his efforts, I am confident that the experiences that have been chronicled will find the readership it deserves and mentor future generations of upcoming commanding officers of naval platforms and leadership in the Nigerian Navy.

I am also optimistic that this laudable initiative will inspire others to pen their experiences as they contribute towards archiving historical accounts as well as the corporate and institutional knowledge of the Nigerian Navy.

Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ekwe Ibas

22nd Chief of the Naval Staff

Nigerian Navy

Preface

This book renders an account of the period I was in command of NNS OKPABANA, a frontline capital ship and frigate of the Nigerian Navy (NN) from November 2015 to October 2016. I considered it necessary to chronologically document my experience on board, primarily to honour the men and women who served with me and made my tenure on board successful. I also considered it an honour and privilege to have had a rare opportunity for sea command and therefore felt documenting my experience on board would add to the collective institutional knowledge and history of the NN.

It is necessary to state that although the job of a commanding officer of seagoing ship can be prestigious, dignifying, honourable, and arguably the best job in any navy, it can also present some of the most perilous of circumstances that can ruin careers and even lead to loss of lives and materiel in other situations. Therefore, the third and probably the most important reason for writing this book is to share my experience for those in command and future commanding officers as a reference material, if so desired.

Victory with Honour is therefore a simple freestyle narrative of my time on board Nigerian Navy Ship OKPABANA (F93), arguably one of the finest ships in the NN fleet. However, it is not an attempt to indulge in some form of vainglorious self-adulation. I mean to tell my story as it is and as I saw it firsthand during the 3,025 hours we spent at sea in service to our nation, Nigeria.

1

The Concept of Navies and

the Essence of Seapower

It would be quite remiss of me to discuss the concept of navies and the essence of sea power without recourse to historical proponents of these maritime or naval perceptions such as Ken Booth, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Geoffrey Till, amongst others. In his book Navies and Foreign Policy (1977), Ken Booth divided the functions of navies into three major roles, military, diplomatic, and policing roles, which are quite familiar in their commonalty to our navy. Geoffrey Till, on the other hand, defined roles for two types of navies. These include the postmodern navy and the modern navy (Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty First Century, 2009). Also, Till postulated that maritime security issues cannot be resolved by any single state and argued that the enabler for a postmodern navy is a contributory fleet. According to Till, the roles of a postmodern navy comprise four aspirational deliverables, namely sea control, expeditionary operations, good order at sea, and maintenance of maritime consensus. These types of navies tend to be more cooperative and collaborative.

On the contrary, modern navies tend to have a balanced fleet backed up with indigenous defence industries, with more focus on the competitive rather than the complementary nature of maritime strategy. Modern navies tend to see other navies as an obstruction to the attainment of their strategic aspirations, whereas postmodern navies see other navies as collaborators and partners to collectively address maritime threats and challenges. Notwithstanding, these identified roles are not mutually exclusive, because navies usually adopt whichever role suits them depending on the strategic or foreign policy objective with which they are tasked at any particular time.

In trying to illustrate the linkage between navies and foreign policy, Ken Booth suggested that the functions of navies ought to be conceived as a trinity and that the unity of the trinity is provided by the idea of the use of the sea. This unity was described as the underlying consideration in the whole business of navies and foreign policy. It was further stated that the character of the trinity could be defined by the three distinctive modes of action by which navies carry out their task—namely, the military, the diplomatic, and the policing functions.

For the sake of clarity, I would argue that the military roles of navies—balance of power and projection of force functions—could be considered the foundation upon which the trinity rests and constitutes the most important attribute of a navy. This assertion is premised on the realism that the essence of navies, I would say, inherently lies in the perception of their military character, from which the policing (coastguard responsibilities and nation-building), diplomatic (viz., manipulation, negotiation from a position of strength), and prestige functions are derived.

The nexus between navies and foreign policy was then seen in the light of the political elite being able to construct a navy based on the foreign policy imperatives it would be required to meet. The policy objectives would then determine the size and composition of the force, the character and timing of deployment and employment, tactics to adopt, and more. In essence, the use of the sea as determined by the shape or form of the navy is a direct consequence of foreign policy objectives that are to be attained by a state.

Having briefly illustrated the relationship between navies and foreign policy, a logical question that follows is, What, then, is seapower? Early scholars such as Burckhardt, Grote, and Ruskin can be said to have introduced the concept of seapower into common lexicon or usage from the Greek word thalassocracy, which can also simply refer to naval supremacy in either the military or commercial sense of the word. The ancient Greeks first used thalassocracy to describe the government of the Minoan civilization, whose power was founded on its navy.

According to Andrew Lambert, The intellectual achievements of classical Greece remain the foundation for any enquiry into the meaning of seapower as strategy, culture, identity or empire.¹ The Athenians understood that seapower culture lay at the heart of politics, economic development, art, and identity. They also realized that becoming a seapower was more complex than acquiring a navy.

Furthermore, Andrew Lambert postulated that a seapower can be viewed as a state that chose to emphasise the sea to secure the economic and strategic advantages of sea control and function thereby as a great power through a consciously constructed seapower culture and identity. Additionally, Lambert advanced the thought that seapowers were maritime imperial great powers, dependent on the control of ocean communications for cohesion, commerce, and control. In essence, seapower was more or less a constructed national identity.

In 2017, Admiral James Stavridis, USN (rtd), described seapower or naval power as a driver of human history and a crucial element in our geopolitical path² and also elucidated on how the geography of the oceans has shaped the destiny of nations.

In addition to Burckhardt, Grote, and Ruskin, much earlier, Alfred Thayer Mahan addressed the concept of seapower. In his seminal work, The Influence of Sea power Upon History 1660–1783, Mahan split the word seapower into the phrase sea power in a bid to draw a distinction between seapower as a national identity and sea power as a strategy by a naval power, such as the United States of America or Republican Rome (from which he drew inspiration for his classification of the United States). Mahan’s phrase sea power was restricted to the strategic use of the sea by any state with enough men, money, and harbours to build a navy, a list that included more continental hegemons than cultural seapowers. The overall objective was to ensure that the United States became an economic power using sea power as a strategy.

According to Gompert, Mahan’s theory flowed from his observation that the nineteenth century’s greatest power was also its greatest sea power: Great Britain. Mahan noted that Britain gave unalloyed commitment to developing sea power because it was a phenomenon that delivered national economic success and strategic advantage. Thus, growing commercial and financial strength enabled the country to adequately fund outsized naval fleets, and those fleets protected the trade and achieved the victories that enabled the British economy to flourish³. Mahan noticed that Britain had peers (France, for instance) in all categories of power save one: sea power!

It was their superiority at sea that enabled the British to excel in exploiting industrial technology, in expanding production well beyond domestic demand, and in securing access to the world’s abundance of raw materials. This implied that sea power was the sine qua non for world power and strategic advantage. Indeed, Britain’s navy made it the superpower of the nineteenth century. Knowing this, British leaders built and followed a national strategy based on sea power, and they saw to it that the Royal Navy would get the resources it needed to remain dominant.

Notwithstanding, Encyclopaedia Britannica described sea power as the means by which a nation extends its military power onto the seas. Measured in terms of a nation’s capacity to use the seas in defiance of rivals and competitors, it consists of such diverse elements as combat craft and weapons, auxiliary craft, commercial shipping, bases, and trained personnel. Others include aircraft, which, when used in the control of seaborne transportation, functions as an instrument of sea power (even when they operate from a land base), whereas aircraft operating from carriers represent the extension of sea power (even when they are attacking targets deep inland).

Except for the great increase in bombardment of shore or inland targets from the sea, the functions of sea power were the same in World War II as they were in the sixteenth century, when warships specifically designed for fighting (as distinguished from armed merchantmen) first appeared.

The capacity for sea power depends upon such factors as population, character of government, soundness of economy, number and quality of harbours, extent of coastline, and the number and location of a nation’s colonies and bases with respect to desired sea traffic.⁴ Furthermore, sea power as defined by Mahan is not a single property but a combination of factors that figured prominently in a nation’s security, prosperity, and influence in the world. A nation possessing sea power could enrich itself through trade, protect and expand its commerce and possessions abroad, and make possible the most glorious and most useful enterprises ⁵. Mahan then elaborated six conditions that define a nation’s sea power, at least in the latter nineteenth century: geographical position, physical conformation, extent of territory, requisite population, character of the people, and character of the government.

In wartime, the main purpose of sea power has always been to protect friendly shipping from enemy attack and to destroy or hinder the enemy’s commercial and military shipping. When one belligerent or the other has virtual control of surface shipping in portions of the seas, he is said to have command of the seas, with the ability both to defend his own sea communications and deny communications to the enemy.

Sea power may also be exerted to apply military and economic pressure on an enemy by preventing the import of commodities necessary for prosecution of war. It may prevent him from obtaining funds through the export of commodities to neutrals, and it may prevent neutrals from trading with the enemy. This use of sea power is known as blockade and has usually been exercised according to specific procedures prescribed by international law.

Furthermore, as alluded to by Kamal-Deen Ali, Mahan’s doctrinal ethos bounded naval power with the pursuit of vital national strategic objectives. It viewed conquest and trade as the inseparable instrument of national power and prosperity, and sea power as not just an instrument for trade but also a means of establishing dominion over territories across the world.

It could be argued that Mahan’s concept of sea power might be dated, but going as far back as the seventeenth century, his theories still hold true in today’s application of sea power as it relates to commerce or mercantile trade. This allusion was very well illustrated by Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes in their book Red Star Over the Pacific, in which the authors gave a very lucid account of the rise of China as a maritime power and the apparent challenge to US maritime strategy. The book expertly espoused the importance of the seas to China’s overall economic strategy through the application of sea power as theorized by Mahan. For example, the use of harbour infrastructure in remote regions such as river ports, inland waterways for transport, and chains of seaports along the country’s over fourteen thousand kilometres of coastline were identified as the physical interface between China’s commercial aspirations and global trade. For this reason, China would strategically protect these maritime assets, including her immediate waters, from any form of interference that may impinge on her economic aspirations.

The contestations between China, the United States, and other regional powers in the South China Sea can therefore be seen as a manifestation of the need for China to protect her maritime trade and economic aspirations. The Belt and Road Initiative is one of such economic strategies intrinsically tied to China’s rising sea power status. The challenge to US maritime strategy in the region further highlights one aspect of what has been referred to as the Thucydides Trap at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The phrase, coined by Graham T. Allison, refers to a situation where a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one; the most likely outcome being war. This may be unlikely in the case of the United States and China, but the maritime domain would remain a medium through which strategic and economic aspirations are expressed by sea power states for a long time to come.

In the same vein, Nigerian Navy historical accounts have it that like other maritime nations, Nigeria realised the importance of seapower, or sea power as the case may be, and identified the need to have a navy to protect her interests at sea in line with the contemporary trend at the time of her formation. Thus, in 1956, the Nigerian Navy (NN) was established to protect Nigeria’s maritime territorial integrity and be a vanguard of Nigeria’s sea power aspirations, whilst playing a central and critical role in providing a safe, secure and enabled maritime environment for socio-economic activities to thrive⁶.

Again, in line with linkage between foreign policy and navies earlier espoused, the NN conceptualised the Trident Strategy, which was borne out of the perception of Nigeria’s foreign policy, threat assessment, and strength and sophistication of the NN fleet in the early 1980s. The Trident Strategy was formulated in 1987 and provided an operational framework for the employment of the NN fleet in fulfilment of its statutory roles as enshrined in the 1979 Constitution.

The Trident Strategy comprised three components.

a. Effective coastal defence to protect the coastal approaches, territorial waters, Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and oil resources.

b. Giving the army adequate sealift and naval gunfire support in amphibious operations.

c. Providing subregional sea control in peace and in war in defence of Nigeria’s maritime interests.

Furthermore, there was the operational concept of Maritime Defence in Depth (MDID) which was based on three concentric circles or overlapping perimeters of defence.

a. Level 1 bordered on coastal defence and included in-shore policing operations, which was aimed at ensuring a twenty-four-hour surveillance and provision of early warning system up to a range of one hundred nautical miles.

b. Level 2 concerned naval presence in the EEZ for exercising sea control for military purposes and to protect offshore resources.

c. Level 3 prescribed the outer ring of the defence-in-depth concept characterised by surveillance and intelligence gathering, as well as occasional independent and joint operational training exercises beyond the country’s immediate waters.

It can thus be surmised that the foregoing operational concepts adopted by the NN was very much in alignment with Nigeria’s foreign policy objectives at the time they were articulated. These operational concepts further validated the NN’s position as a regional maritime power and as a contiguous navy as postulated by Booth. The Trident Strategy also guided the acquisition of NN assets to meet the requirements for layered deployment as required.

However, over the course of time, strategic imperatives, the nature of threats, and the dynamics of the geostrategic environment rendered the Trident Strategy inadequate for the NN to meet her emergent operational requirements consistent with the reality of contemporary times. These circumstances led to the re-evaluation of the Trident Strategy and subsequently the promulgation of the Total Spectrum Maritime Strategy, which is discussed in the next chapter.

Having briefly illustrated my understanding of the concept of navies and the essence of seapower or sea power, what readily comes to mind is the relevance of these precepts to a book of this nature. I would state that there lies a commonality in the concept of navies and the essence of seapower or sea power, as the case may be. I also add that this commonality is the central character around which navies are built or conceived as one of the tools which may be used to advance the sea power or seapower interests of states. That common thread is known as a man-of-war, or warship.

According to J. J. Widen in his article Naval Diplomacy—A Theoretical Approach, he described a warship, inter alia, as a symbol of national sovereignty and power⁷. Writing in a 1978 journal, Navies and Foreign Policy, C. I. Hamilton argues that a ship can be moved quickly and efficiently to a coast where it is required, and once there, it can be called upon to perform a multitude of tasks: it can turn itself into a fairground, to delight and entertain the people of the port; it can threaten and over-awe, even without firing a shot; it can land troops and intervene actively on land as well as at sea. Or it may do none of these things but merely wait, as it is well adapted to do, until the slow process of events—or of the decision-making mechanism in the home country—has made it clear what action should be pursued.⁸

In essence, a warship can be considered as perhaps the only military tool that is inherently flexible enough to be applied across the entire spectrum, from the tactical to the strategic, depending on the desired outcome of the leadership, be it military or political. It is not the intention to reel out the various attributes of warships, however some of these include access, mobility, lift capacity, and versatility (flexibility in response, adaptability in roles, joint or combinable). Other characteristics include sustained reach, resilience, poise, and leverage. As stated by Christopher Martin, the characteristics of warships define the ability of naval forces or nation states to utilise the sea for political and military purposes. The deployment of ships allows a state to influence events at sea or from the sea as they might affect its vital interests.

Thus, bringing the aforementioned into context, a man-of-war cannot by any means be seen as just another ship on water. A warship has a major role to play and can be considered the strongest link in the overall strategic-political-military-security value chain of any maritime nation or sea power state. The employment of a warship at sea, even though tactical or operational, eventually results in strategic