Quote Originally Posted by Ron Humphrey View Post
So do we need new words? Probably not but does it hurt to have them if they at least lead someone to look for what they don't know rather than what they think they do?
When you clearly have a new phenomena, you should name it. Example would be "Tank" "Paratrooper" or "Deep battle." There is very very little new (actually I think none) that we need to describe currently.

Quote Originally Posted by Courtney Massengale View Post
I don't think we need new words - what we need are people willing to study and think about how warfare is evolving (or when we get to the point where we say it has evolved during this time period).
...but you have hundreds/thousands of these people, all hand-wringing about "complex adaptive" "human terrain," and all the other silly words. There is an entire industry pretending to study warfare's evolution, and it's inability to speak clear English and study military history has lead to this mess.

For example, its a disservice to say that the internet is just a different battlefield for guerilla or irregular warfare, therefore everything that could be said already has; we're just waiting for it to fall into our preconstructed schemas that have held for hundreds of years.
The Internet cannot be a "battle field." It's a source of information, and very much less successful at crafting opinion that TV, Radio, or newspapers. It's a form of media. Personally it fails my "so what test" as being something in need to worry about.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. I am all for the true, practical and useful study of warfare, and education about war, but the vast majority of what is being done is being done to justify the US buying new toys.

All the current writing about COIN, since 2001, has not identified ANYTHING new, except to reinforce the error that "COIN" is somehow a distinct and separate form of something that ..um ...errr... might not really be warfare. - which is rubbish.