Preparing for the Next War

General John R. Galvin

"We in the military often are accused falsely of “preparing to fight not the next war but the last.”  That criticism is not well placed: we are not, for the most part, obtuse enough to fight yesterday’s war—but we might be doing something worse still.  When we think about the possibilities of conflict we tend to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war, a theater with battlefields we know, conflict that fits our understanding of strategy and tactics, a combat environment that is consistent and predictable, fightable with the resources we have, one that fits our plans, our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas.  We arrange in our minds a war we can comprehend in our own terms, usually with an enemy that looks like us and acts likes us.  This comfortable conceptualization becomes the accepted way of seeing things and, as such, ceases to be an object of further investigation unless it comes under serious challenge as a result of some major event—usually a military disaster."[1]

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[1] General John R. Galvin, U.S. Army, “Uncomfortable Wars: Toward a New Paradigm,” Parameters, Winter, 1986.