Comparison of DOS operating systems

Strategy and Tactics

Warfare and military planning in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is quite different than ever before. There has been a clear shift in thought about warfare, and what it takes to triumph not only on, but off the battlefield. Instead of conflict focusing on industrial war, politicians move in a focus it as war among the people -- a shift in which the outcome of any conflict cannot be resolved solely through military expertise. The 20th century is not really an anomaly in the number and robustness of conflict; each century has its warfare, revolutions, civil wars, and internal strife. What makes the 20th century unique, though, it that modern technology, for the first time ever, was able to kill and maim at a level unprecedented in history? In fact, at the end of World War II and the succeeding years of the Cold War, technology was finally able to do the unthinkable -- destroy the entire planet and all of human civilization with by pressing a few buttons (Smith, 2007).

This is the real challenge for modern military planners -- there is no real map of the way the post-Cold War World works since "today we have a world in which sophisticated weapons, information technology, and global communications are available on the open market," as opposed to richer, more developed nations being the only ones who could afford such power (Rife, 1998). Taking a clue from the 1992 book Men are from Marx, Women are from Venus, in which relationship counsel John Gray asserted that most problems in relationships arise because of the fundamental difference in gender, Colonel Rickey Rife of the Army War College proposes that the post-Cold War world is so ambiguous that foreign policy leadership almost speaks a different language than defense experts. They may have the same overall goal, but diplomacy (State) and defense (Military) have merged together to form an uneasy partnership that often seems to work at opposite ends of the spectrum.

One very standard definition of war states that it is a quarrel between nations conducted by force -- when two groups are unable to communicate reasonably and meaningfully or when a group's nature is collectively aggressive (Somerville, 1975, p. 199). In the modern era, the economic, cultural and political structure of the world has changed and with it the nature of war has become ill-defined and rather murky. Violence from terrorist or fringe groups without a clear political agenda, conflicts that cause, above all, humanitarian issues, and simply groups that have no interest in utilizing diplomacy make statecraft almost impossible, yet without statecraft in the modern age, the military is rather hobbled (Watkins, 2009).

Certainly, if there is but one thing that many of the events of the early 21st century taught us, it is that cross-communication and the ability to functionalize one goal is vital. 9/11, terrorist attacks, even Hurricane Katrina all pointed to the need for a "successful, long-term 'relationship' [that] requires a thorough understanding of the character traits, institutional values, and personality preferences of the… other" ties State and Defense together and requires alignment (Rife).

Retired U.S. Ambassador Edward Marks also sees differences between the styles of Defense and State, particularly in decision making style and approach to problems. This is not to say that the military has a single style. For example, in decision making style differences arise from professional backgrounds, "the decision cycle of a fighter pilot (the Navy Captain) [is] measured in seconds while that of an infantry officer (the Colonel) in hours and days." If one compounds this paradigm with career Statists, who tend to measure decisions in months or years based on "never enough data," we can see the conundrum (Marks, 2007).