Depending on how history is written, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be looked back on as the beginning of a third world war. President Zelensky’s government, along with its advocates in allied governments, has been making this argument since the war’s inception. They frame Ukraine as one battlefield in a larger global struggle, one that pits a growing axis of authoritarian nations against the Western-oriented liberal democracies that have dominated the post-Cold War world order. In this version of history, the war in Ukraine is not the Ukrainians’ war alone but the West’s war, too, an existential struggle for all freedom-loving peoples. There is plenty of evidence that lends credence to this argument. Had Putin’s initial invasion gone according to plan, a year later we would be talking about a similar invasion of Taiwan — as we anyway already are envisioning — and then the question of whether we were in the midst of a third world war would hardly merit debate. Conditions remain ripe for an upheaval of the global order of the type induced by a world war. These upheavals, in the modern era, have occurred approximately every century. The First and Second World War should more properly be categorized as a single conflict with Versailles more of a ceasefire than a peace, and the twenty years of the Napoleonic Wars that birthed a century of continental stability certainly qualify as a world war. One indicator that we might already be in a world war — or that one is imminent — is that the generation that can remember the last one has died. Without memories to restrain us, we become reliant on our imaginations, not only to prevent war but, if one begins, to help us navigate its exigencies, and to win. Whether the war in Ukraine is part of a third world war, in which liberal democracies must beat back a rising tide of authoritarianism, or whether it is an isolated territorial-philosophical conflict is not a question of semantics. Defining a war’s scope is essential for any war planning, and for any victory. The role of imagination in the making of strategy has too often been under-appreciated. The conclusions that planners and officials will draw from analysis and data will always be circumscribed by the limits of what they can imagine about the future, by their sense of historical possibilities. If it is true, as the old adage has it, that generals always fight the last war, that is in part because they have not trained their imaginations to picture the next one. Inspired by its disgust with the Iraq war, the Obama administration drew the conclusion, and enshrined it in Pentagon doctrine, that land wars are a thing of the past. Tell that to the tank officers in Ukraine. Innovation — of concepts and weapons, of everything — always involves imagination. And the imagination of future warfare is essential also for another reason: it forces us to conceive of the war from our adversary’s point of view as well as from our own. The strategic imagination is a significant deterrent to the other side’s greatest advantage, which is strategic surprise. While the strategic imagination can certainly run wild — remember General Buck Turgidson — the greater danger is that it not run at all. In the past fifty years, America’s two great military defeats —Vietnam and Afghanistan — were the result of misunderstanding the scope of the wars that we were fighting. In the former, American policymakers believed we were engaged in, as President Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, “a long twilight struggle” against transnational communism, when in fact the Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation. In Afghanistan, we believed we were fighting “a different kind of war,” as President Bush said to Congress ten days after September 11, a war against transnational terrorism. Yet like the Vietnamese, the Taliban were also fighting a war of national liberation with no objective greater than expelling foreigners from their homeland so that they could impose their theocracy upon the population. Their sympathies with al-Qaeda were nauseating, but not their reason for being. In both incidents, a failure to imagine our adversary’s psyches and define the true nature of their objectives and of the very war we were fighting led us to disaster. Although it would be easy to discount the Kremlin’s absurd narrative of the war in Ukraine — one in which Zelensky is a Nazi, the West is the aggressor, and there is a genocide against ethnic Russians — it would be a mistake to ignore this narrative entirely, no matter how ridiculous, both when formulating a strategy to defeat Russia and when creating an agenda for our own strategic imagination. The first item on this agenda must be a robust understanding of the conflict from our adversary’s point of view. Data alone may not be able to depict our enemy. The specifics of such an understanding will be fluid, it will involve imaginative interpretation, and it will consistently clash with our own narrative. A war is like a coin. It has two sides, and what we call the casus belli is really a debate as to what side of the coin we are on: whether a revolution is in fact a civil war; whether an invasion is in fact a liberation. Irreconcilable political narratives — or imaginaries, to use the academically popular term — are not a contradiction. The war itself becomes the very process through which these narratives will be resolved. But any strategy that does not consider an adversary’s counter-narrative — no matter how odious that narrative might be — is destined to fail. 
Although war is waged in the consciousness of peoples and nations, it is also a craft that requires a tradesman’s skill. Both the Napoleonic Wars and the world wars of the twentieth century resulted in societal and technological advances that few could have predicted. Perhaps the greatest innovation of the Napoleonic Age was the
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence