I remember in February 2002 when former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld came up with this logic, "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." At that time, I was a young Army Lieutenant Colonel and found this thought process to be somewhat nebulous, but I came to understand it. There are times we refer to the uncertainty of the battlefield as the "fog of war,” and in many ways, today's modern, 21st-century battlefield takes on that characterization.

Back when I first joined the military, the world was rather simple, bifurcated. There was the U.S. and the USSR, and it appeared that all the global actors aligned themselves with one or the other. There were many proxy conflicts that were fought between the two, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, but for the most part, we operated in the realm of the "known knowns."

A New World Order

Then it happened, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many saw that as a time when a new "peace" would be ushered in. However, there was a gentleman, Samuel Huntington, who wrote a book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.” This was one of the books I read as part of my second Master’s thesis at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officers College (CGSC).

The Clinton Administration had written a National Security Strategy titled "Towards a Universal Cosmopolitan State" as a post-Cold War strategy. It was referring to the philosophy of one Immanuel Kant, who envisioned a global political order where people were seen as equal citizens of the world,........

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