"Political Warfare" "Gray Zone Conflicts" "The Long War" "Unrestricted Warfare" etc., etc., etc.

To what end? To what purpose? What do we possibly gain by allowing those who work within the military profession to convince us to label and think of all forms of competition between powerful organizations with diverse interests as some form of "war"?

Is peace so frightening? I have never seen a nation that is both so desirous of, and at the same time fearful of, peace as is the United States of America. It is an odd dichotomy.

Peace has always been a messy business. Are we still so mentally abused by our experience in Vietnam that we now must insist that every time our national leaders feel the need to employ our military forces in dangerous and violent competition that we must also burden our nation by making each of those situations also a "war" that we therefore must win?

We must not be Pollyannaish about peace, but nor need we fear it. Those who wish too hard for perpetual war may find to their chagrin that prophesies of that nature are all too often self-fulfilling.

Seeing every revolutionary insurgent and insurgent group as some form of "terrorist" has been a strategic disaster for the US over post 9/11 era. To see every state competitor working outside the lines of the rules and policies we have put in place to shape the global competition in our favor promises to produce strategic backlash of an even greater nature.

We have defined an approach to the world that has us in a posture of playing not to lose, while our competitors are all playing to win. We do not need a grand strategy of perpetual warfare, but we do need a grand strategy that defines a game we too can play to win.