If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then this book is for you.   It delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike. What’s more, just as attritional wars are becoming quite common, conflict elongation – wars of extended duration – are also becoming the norm. Through insightful analysis and a keen understanding of geopolitical intricacies, Amos Fox navigates the reader through the intricate interplay of these trends, shedding light on their profound implications for global security. This riveting work challenges conventional wisdom, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary nature of armed conflicts, ultimately urging a reconsideration of strategies and policies in the face of an ever-evolving battlefield.
 
Amos Fox is doing more clear-eyed thinking about the evolution of the character of warfare over the past 20 years and what it portends for the future of conflict than virtually anyone else. This book challenges current analysis, current assumptions and decisions by many current military analysts, senior defense and military leaders. This work should gain their attention and spark an intellectually rooted debate about what the intersection of war, societies and technologies means for how we will fight and how we should organize and prepare for it. Amos Fox has prepared a primer for the Pentagon brass to educate themselves on the issues at hand and gives a prescription of how to proceed. Let’s hope they read it. 
Major General (Retired)Patrick Donahoe, US Army former Commanding General of the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence and Fort Benning
 
Military theory has been discarded for too long in the West - systemically across martial institutions. Amos Fox provides the essential corrective. Against the shouty voices of technology evangelists and fiction-loving futurologists, this book provides compelling evidence that lazy thinking since 9/11 has handed the advantage to adversaries - not through their ingenuity, but by our own acceptance of the mediocre and the wilful denigration of military theory. Fox, thankfully, provides us with a way out of this fix.
Professor Peter Roberts
 
 
Publication date: 20th August 2024
hardback: 9781912440528
paperback: 9781912440535
EPUB: 9781912440610
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