On this cold morning I am sitting by the kitchen window sipping a cup of coffee and watching the mixture of rain, snow and sleet pouring down. April has been a month of relentless rain. So far we have had a wet, cold damp spring. 

While I am comfy, warm, cozy and dry in my home I am thinking, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, folk want to play.”  We all remember that childhood saying. ( My late husband would say,” Ot oh, mother is thinking!”  There is a lot to think about.

Yes, folks want to enjoy a life with freedom, peace, happiness, health and security. The news gets one to thinking about the future. There are so many changes. The last century and a half has seen an explosion of technological advancements and destructiveness in war. Technology and war have become far more complicated and understanding them will require hard work.

Listening to the media,   reading the newspapers and reports about what is happening in the world, and right here at home makes one think about a new and frightening complex world.  I do not have the necessary understanding of war or technology to make a sound judgement about either.  How will the arm race using all the advanced technologies, advanced weapons and new styles of war change the relationship of soldiers?    

How can we respond to the serious national security challenges ahead? How will technology change wars as we know them?  The dramatic developments in technology and war have developed so fast, how will these challenge soldiers, decision makers and the public? The public is us. How will twentieth-first –century wars affect the average citizen?

Our armed forces are critical to the safety and security of our country and its interest. We owe them much respect and gratitude and our freedom.  They will have new threats facing them in technology and in a global military situations.

How will soldiers themselves think about future war and their role in it?  We must face new technologies, new enemies, societal changes, nuclear terrorism, biological warfare, synthetic biology and more changes.  How about robots and drugs?

Dr. Robert H. Latiff retired from the U.S. Air Force as a major general in 2006. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Notre Dame and is the director of Intelligence Community Program at George Mason University’s Volgenau School of Engineering. Latiff is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control and the Intelligence Community Studies Board of the National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He issues a wake-up call to the nation as we prepare for a very different form of war.

I do not have the necessary understanding of war or technology to be able to make sound judgement about either.