The Past and Present as Prologue: A View of Future Warfare Through the Lens of Contemporary Conflicts

Eight years of war have given the U.S. military an unparalleled opportunity to translate real war experience into a vision of how conflicts will be fought in the future. Getting a vision of the future more right than wrong depends on the military s ability to sift through experiences gathered from combat to discern those that will endure. This monograph seeks to do just that. A key premise of this paper is that the United States emerging national security strategy is right in postulating a future conflict environment dominated by irregular wars. For brevity, the paper concentrates on a few characteristics of future irregular wars that are likely to endure. For clarity, it parses the vision into the three classic levels of war; strategic, operational, and tactical. And for credibility, it concentrates on the ground dimension for two reasons: because Afghanistan and Iraq, like all irregular wars, are being fought principally on the ground and because the author s past intellectual endeavors and expertise have been in that dimension.