Author: Lukas Milevski

Submitted by Lukas Milevski, PhD student under Professor Colin S. Gray at the University of Reading (UK):

              What will future conflict look like?  This inquiry is a hardy perennial of strategic studies.  It is also, unfortunately, impossible to answer in detail.  The future is unknowable; no trove of evidence for it exists.  Yet strategists have an invaluable resource in the four and a half thousand years of recorded history.  Thus one may confidently predict, as Colin Gray does, that this will be another bloody century.  Yet perhaps one may anticipate details of future conflict by emphasizing the enduring nature which unites all conflicts.  As Michael Howard rightly noted, “[f]or after all allowances have been made for historical differences, wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity.”[1]