How Has War Changed Since the End of the Cold War?

As location is the key to property values, so context is, or at least should be, the most important variable in the understanding of war. The necessity to take due account of the central significance of the several contexts of war is the first of the four caveats to be addressed. The analysis of recent changes in war presented in the next section of the article needs to be informed by the warnings provided here. For the West, and for the most part, 12 of the past 15 years can fairly be described as an interwar period. That brief no-name era, usually referred to neutrally as the post-Cold War period, came to an explosive end on 11 September 2001. The shake-down years following more than four decades of Cold War were bound to be confusing and disorienting. The information revolution in warfare that had been brewing slowly for decades, but which picked up speed in the 1990s, paled to near insignificance compared with the political revolution that brought down the Evil Empire almost without bloodshed. As always, politics rules. The dominant contextual fact about war for the United States over the past 15 years has, of course, been geopolitical. The abrupt demise of the Soviet rival, meaning the sudden absence of a balancing power, out-