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Governments across the globe are increasingly adopting a more aggressive approach to combat informal artisanal mining, including the deployment of the military to prevent environmental pollution, restore degraded sites, improve environmental quality, and ensure a sustainable ecosystem. The military approach has often lacked effective stakeholder participation and failed to curb informal mining. We contribute to the debate on this subject by focusing on Ghana's military intervention to eradicate informal artisanal mining. Informal mining continues in the country's forests and waters unabated despite the fatalities, gunshot injuries, burning of excavators, and destruction of mining tools resulting from the recent military strategy – ‘Operation Halt.’ We conclude that the use of military force will have little and unsustainable effect to eradicate informal artisanal mining when the factors driving the participation in the mining …