ABSTRACT
Other journalists, historians and military offi cers predicted that ongoing social trends would prove even more revolutionary, possibly destroying the nation-state itself and ushering in a neo-medieval age of overlapping political systems or a neo-barbaric age of anarchy (Kaplan 1994: passim) From the late 1990s onwards, spectacular terrorist attacks and equally spectacular responses have lent credence to these hypotheses. Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s 1998/9 decision to attack Serbia without UN authorization challenged earlier concepts of world order and American President George Bush Jr’s 2003 decision to bypass the UN in invading Iraq undermined them even further. RMA technology helped Western coalitions overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq in short order. Since then, insurgents in both countries have plagued Western forces in ways that would have been familiar decades or even centuries earlier. In some circumstances, old principles remain lethally valid, and that may be what makes ongoing changes in military affairs most diffi cult to analyse.
