ABSTRACT
In his What is History? E. H. Carr posited that, “Nothing in history is inevitable except in the formal sense that, for it to have happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to be different.”1 True enough. It was certainly not inevitable that late 1970s and early 1980s defense initiatives would culminate in revolutionary shifts in the effectiveness of US conventional warfighting forces as the Cold War ended peacefully. And it was certainly not inevitable that American military forces and defense planners would find themselves struggling with counterinsurgency warfare in the 2000s.
