Van Creveld maintains that these changes are well on their way to undermining liberal democracy. However, they now threaten to spread into the developed one as well.’ These threats combined with mass immigration, computers, data mining and the Internet are threatening more developed countries and increasingly also the West. The wars in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, the Congo, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq are ‘long wars that have brought with them an extraordinary amount of destruction.’ Many of these changes, van Creveld pointed out, ‘first originated in the so-called developing world. What remains, is the huge number of civilian casualties (known as 'collateral damage') as well as the growing tendency that wars last much longer than ordinary wars. Today wars are fought by a more complex array of actors with different motivations and strategies.

Trinitarian war was based on a clear division of labor between the government that wages the war and directs it, the armed forces that fight it and die for it and the people who pay it for it, and suffer from it. The character of war has changed forever. One important aspect of war that has changed forever is the shift from Trinitarian war to non-Trinitarian war. These new wars in comparison to WWII are relatively small in size and scope and they are becoming more intrastate conflicts as opposed to interstate, although such conflicts occasionally bleed into other states due the absence of clearly defined borders and well-defined fronts. What has also changed is that wars since 1945 include many different actors and have now a variety of different names to describe them including: brushfire, guerrilla, people’s war, rebellion, uprisings, insurgencies, and terrorism. In contrast, he noted that wars today are mostly waged between 'third or fourth rate countries.' Today, wars are much smaller in size if one measures them both in the number of countries and non-state actors involved and in the size of the forces.

Three percent of the world population disappeared during World War II. No part of the world remained untouched, and the casualties were horrific, ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million, with civilian victims somewhere between 50 to 55 million, including 19 to 28 million from war-related disease and famine. Van Creveld further highlighted that the unprecedented scope of World War II was also a turning point in world history. Van Creveld asked ‘Does this new paradigm shift mean that there will never be a nuclear war?’ He stated ‘not necessarily.’ The paradox remains: if it were certain nukes would not be used, they couldn’t deter anyone. With the possibility of a second strike, victory and defeat were no longer part of the equation or choices that were available. No weapon has ever been invented that does not have a defensive counter-element, except for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons marked the moment when there could no longer be a real victory or even survival. However, according to the speaker, the real shift in strategy came with the introduction of nuclear weapons systems, which marked the greatest turning point in strategy. Van Creveld noted the rise of air war, as well as at sea (submarine war), space war, and cyberwar, and the demise of Blitzkrieg, the introduction of new weapons and weapon systems in war raging from tanks and machine guns to Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs). Yet despite these constants, numerous aspects of war have changed, requiring new military strategies. Van Creveld also stressed the continuing importance of strategic surprise and the need for quality over quantity in all aspects. Uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations, the 'fog of war' remains a factor, as does the need for leadership, organisation, discipline and cohesion. It still depends on a mixture of force and guile and has to deal with the S trapazen (stress and strain) of conflict. According to van Creveld, military strategy still faces the difficulty of exercising political control over an event so fraught with emotion. He shared observations on how military strategy has changed and remained constant in the new security landscape. On 12 February, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) conducted a public discussion with Martin van Creveld, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Strategic war