Battles Change, Wars Don't

Op-Ed in today's LA Times - Battles Change, Wars Don't by Victor Davis Hanson.

"MODERNISTS LIKE to believe that we have entered an entirely new era of armed conflict. To some military thinkers, it's the primordial nature of the terrorists' beheadings, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices that has marked a completely new form of 'asymmetrical warfare' in which the two sides are terribly mismatched."

"Others have a different argument. They say it is our own high-tech, computer-enhanced munitions that have reinvented the very nature of conflict into something called 4th-generational war..."

This is a decent op-ed piece. Amazing that it made it into the LA Times.;)

The poblem I have with VDH is that he changes his point often. In "Western Way of War" he puts forth the theory that Western way of fighting war (conventional army vs conventional army) is passe becasue no non-western army can field army that will be able to stand up to western armies due to difference in tech. So western armies have to change to be able to fight COIN/small wars. But now he says that war fought 2500 years ago in Greece is no different than one fought now? And that Pelopponesian war was no different that ones fought between Greek polis prior to it?