The modern international security environment has undergone significant changes since the end of the Cold War. The nature of the battlefield has changed from rural to urban. New technology promises tremendous capabilities, and there are new actors on the scene. These changes have had an impact on the approaches used by U.S. security instruments to implement U.S. policy. The U.S. Marine Corps identified the changing battlefield in the later half of the 1990s and articulated its vision of future warfare as the Three Block War.
Concurrent to Marine Corps’ development of the Three Block War was an explosive growth in information technology developments. The end of the Cold War, budgetary pressures, changing face of war, and technological advancements at the start of the 21st Century generated tremendous pressure upon the US military establishment to adapt. Emerging from these pressures was a desire to operationalize the information technology advancements realized at the end of the 20th Century in what is being called Network Centric Warfare.
These two vectors, refining the Three Block War model and Network Centric Warfare, have come to be important elements to the strategies and tactics used to fight in Operation Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom as well as components to the consequent debate about the appropriate structure and composition of the U.S. military for the 21st Century.
The Strategic Corporal and the Emerging Battlefield
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