“For these reasons, this wonderful collection of essays is both timely and particularly relevant. The book’s intellectual framework of the kinetic, connected and synthetic offers a useful sextant for today’s navigators as they explore the outlines of possible armed conflict in the coming years. Each of the contributions in this book afford today’s navigators valuable signposts and insights from a diverse set of perspectives and strategic cultures. Policy makers and students of history can avoid the shoals of future crises from these signposts.
Pundits contend that the dynamics of globalization and rampant technological change have unleashed forces we struggle to keep up with, much less envision their significance for security issues. Yet the terra firma of the past reveals the eternal themes and recurring consequences of security dilemmas, rising and declining powers, repressive regimes with predatory ideologies, and weapons that create entirely new domains of warfare. We recognize the enduring continuities of human agency, uncertainty and friction, and primordial forces. The study of that past, as shown in these pages, is the best guide against dangerous speculation and strategic confusion about the future.”
– Francis G. Hoffman, National Defense University, Washington DC
This excerpt was taken from the foreword of “The Conduct of War in the 21st Century. Kinetic, Connected and Synthetic” by Tim Sweijs, Rob Johnson and Martijn Kitzen. This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated.
The book can be purchased or downloaded here.
Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Experts
Related Content
