The Nigerian Army commissioned a new Wargaming Center at the Army War College Nigeria (AWCN) in Asokoro, Abuja, on 25 June 2026. Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Lieutenant General Waidi Shaibu led the ceremony, joined by AWCN Commandant Major General Umar Alkali. The center gives the Nigerian Army a dedicated home for wargaming, the practice of running structured simulations to test plans and decisions before troops act on them in the field. Officers can now rehearse operations, weigh alternatives, and spot weak points in a plan on a screen or a map table rather than during a live deployment.
Lieutenant General Shaibu called the facility “a major investment in professional military education and institutional capacity development”. He told the officers that ‘today’s security environment needs commanders who are intellectually agile and able to make sound calls under pressure, not just brave under fire’. According to statements from AWCN, the building houses 2 large wargaming halls, 4 tactical exercise rooms, 10 syndicate or breakout rooms, and 3 theatre laboratories for testing operational concepts. A digital server room, a connected library, a conference room, and an expanded Wargame Production Centre for map-making and large-format printing round out the layout.
Major General Alkali said the center would let participants test campaign plans, weigh force employment options, and work through alternative courses of action using both manual tabletop exercises and computer-assisted simulations. He added that the facility folds land, maritime, air, cyber, and information operations into single joint scenarios, a design meant to sharpen how the different services of the Armed Forces of Nigeria work together.
Lieutenant General Shaibu gave the college two specific problems to work on. The first is Nigeria’s mass abduction crisis. He asked planners to use the center’s tools to build practical response options for the wave of kidnappings that has hit forested regions across the country, and to look at how better inter-agency coordination and policy changes might cut the ransom incentives driving the crime. The second task concerns the state-policing proposals now under national discussion; Shaibu wants the college to simulate how a shift to state-level policing would affect security decision-making and response times.
PART OF A WIDER MODERNIZATION PUSH
Aside from the AWCN center, the Armed Forces Command and Staff College in Jaji opened its own operational simulation hub in late 2025, and the Nigerian Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has been running parallel wargaming workshops at the Lieutenant General Faruk Yahaya Manual Wargaming Center in Minna, aimed at giving tactical field commanders a shared planning vocabulary. Together, the projects point to a systematic push to modernize professional military education across the force.
Nigeria’s military requested roughly $3.3 million for simulator acquisition and maintenance, split close to evenly between army land-based systems and air force flight simulators, according to reports by Military Africa in December 2025. It covers simulation equipment across the services broadly rather than the AWCN building itself, but it shows where funding priorities sit as the army leans further into virtual training. A wargaming environment lets planners run a scenario dozens of times, change one variable, and run it again, at a fraction of the cost and with no danger to troops.
