i ntroduction 21which reached its apogee in the world wars of the twentieth century.
After the Second World War, conventional confl ict between mecha-
nized armies became less common and usually did not involve the
major powers. The reason is simple: with the advent of nuclear
weapons, full-scale warfare could have no victor.
Conventional industrial warfare played to the strengths of the United
States as the most advanced industrialized economy, an edge that the
American military has widened over time. In World War II, victory
owed more to the ability of the United States economy to outproduce
its German and Japanese counterparts than to any other single factor.
Th e eff orts of the ineffi cient Soviet military-industrial complex to keep
pace with American advances in military technology during the Cold
War helped bring on the collapse of the Soviet state. As the American
economy entered the post-industrial information age, moreover, the
Pentagon quickly incorporated into its arsenal weapons systems that
made use of advances in computers, lasers, stealth technology, precision
guidance systems, and more. Th e 1991 Gulf War demonstrated that
technology gave the U.S. military an advantage in conventional warfare
that no potential adversary could match. American military planners
talked of a new “revolution in military aff airs”—based on the capacity
of information technology to get inside an enemy’s command-decision
processes, target precisely his command-and-control capabilities, and
leave him directionless—that would make the heavy industrial armies
of even the recent past obsolete. ^
Yet even as the United States asserted its supremacy in conventional
military hardware, the confl icts in which the American military fought
increasingly assumed a diff erent form. Wars after 1945 more often saw
irregular forces engage the troops of established regimes, the latter often
backed externally by one of the superpowers. Th e fi rst such confl icts
were triggered by anticolonial movements, typically with communist
support, as in Vietnam; subsequently, ethnic separatists, radical
Islamists, and others have adopted similar approaches. Unable to match
the fi repower of an established army, adversaries have submerged them-
selves within the population for protection. Irregulars have combined a
political strategy intended to delegitimize the regime with military
tactics designed to neutralize the government’s greater means of vio-
lence, while inducing that government to turn those means against its