The old cliché is that generals are always trying to fight the last war, and quite frankly, we are not. We are trying to win the next one. We are looking around in the world and we find ourselves at flexion point. For the last 16 years, we have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, primarily doing counterinsurgency, counterterrorism type operations. We have just had a new National Defense Strategy come up, and we talk about great power competition.2 Not necessarily that we are going to go to war with great power competition, but we as a military, we need to be ready. And so, we need to change the way we do business. The civilian industry, when it comes to technologies, moves very, very quickly, so we need to adapt our industrialized processes, so we can quickly modernize the military as we go forward.
The above is an excerpt from what General James C. McConville, Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, told Future of War Conference 20183 in Washington, DC, in April 2018. It reflects the three main concerns related to future armed conflicts shared by military leaders in all countries: to correctly gauge the likelihood of a conflict; to adequately
identify adversaries and assess their potential; to avoid defeat before the war by properly organizing war preparations and coordination between military and civilian institutions.
Faced with the growing instability of the international system, greater uncertainty, and declining predictability in the course of international developments, the military, politicians, and experts have been increasingly compelled to speculate about the possibility of a major international military confl ict. Most often, debates on this subject contain allusions to the international situation on the eve of World War I.
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