ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on how current trends, and the trajectories they may take, will affect tomorrow's military operations. The book discusses nine mission types such as high-intensity operations, counter-insurgency, military advising and assistance operations, Special Operation Forces, United Nations operations, urban operations, transnational operations, cyber operations, and operations to protect civilians. Protecting people has become a military-strategic necessity in most types of operations, including operations where it is not the primary objective, this first and foremost derives from the changing nature of contemporary conflict in which civilians are increasingly targeted. But people would argue that the United Nation (UN) is such an important actor in international military operations, and that it imposes such essential boundaries on other actor's behaviour in all international interventions, that it deserves to be analysed as a mission type of its own.
