Introduction

This paper is about how the future is conceived and perceived in military policy circles. The recent proliferation of terms used to articulate the likely features of future warfare—“hybrid,” “unconventional,” and especially “deep” wars—suggests that far from witnessing a coherent military readjustment to future threats, we are instead seeing linguistic, largely bureaucratic efforts to think about the near future, and how we should respond today, in order to be prepared. These military-policy terms are meaningful within expert communities, and may even express felt reality eloquently. However, on the front line, and in the public square, expert discourse smacks of bureaucratic involution, possibly even intentional obfuscation, thus generating paranoia about the true state of affairs.