The WW2 put an end to conventional military theory. The objective of strategy remained as it had been from the days of Buelow and Jomini, to vut the lines of communication. Although many new weaopns like missilies, helicopters, computers and global systems, nothing made the campaign different from what it had been before.
Between 1945 and 1992, many writers focused their effeorts on the ways which new weaopns would be integreated into futurewar and influence its shape.
Throughout this period very great attention was paid to Soviet military theory. War was not only a military struggle. It was a socio-economic phenomenon to be considered “in its entirely”, though just what this meant when it came to details, it was not very clear.

During the 1920s and 1930s Soviet authors such as Tukhachevsky seem to have drawn on their own experience in the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War, both of which had witnessed plenty operational moments with cavalry. Moreover as Marxists the Soviets professed to have as much faith in “the people” as Fuller and Douhet had been sceptical of them. If only fot that reasopn, unlike their Western counterparts they never surrendered to small elite forces.

Shortly after the Battle of Moscow in 1941-42, at a time in which the Soviet Union had just recovered itself from defeats and began to wage “total war” like no other country in history (as Ludendorff predicted). Stalin promulgated the “five permanently operating factors”. The most important factor was the political stability of the homeland. This was followed by the morale of the armed forces, the quality and quantity of their divisions, armament and the commanders capacity for organizing the resources.

On the top of the debate during this time was the issue of nuclear weaopns. But its true significance was not understood at first. Because there were not so many of them around, not was it sure that they would reach their targets or be effective. In september 1949 the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomica bomb and by the early 1950s its arsenal was growing. Thise rose the question hoe the US could be protected against a nuclear attack. A point to be made about Western theories of nuclear power was that they were not put forward by serving generals not retired ones. The theorists were civilians working at universities or “think-tanks”.

Some of the works produced during the Cold War period was:

• Selection and Use of Strategic Airbases (1954) Albert Wholstetter
• Military Policy and National Security (1956) William Kaufman
• Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) Henry Kissinger
• On Thermonuclear War (1960) Herman Kahn
• Arms and Influence (1966) Thomas Schelling

All these works were concerned with preventing war as well as finding better ways to fight it. In the face of weaopns capable of destroying earth, war had become too dangerous to leave to generals, it should be handled by diplomats.

Since the Korean War the rationale behind the various American attempts to find ways for using nuclear weapons in war was the considerable gap in conventional forces believed to exist between the US and the USSR. From at least the time of the publication of Sukolovskys “Soviet Military Strategy” (1961), the Soviet response was that the Americans were misleading themselves. One war or another, and despite countless crises, forty years of Cold War did not end in nuclear war. Such a war had never been close. As Bernhard Brodie wrote in “The Absolute War” (1946) – thus far the chief purpose of a military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.

The nuclear weapons were not capable of preventing all sorts of war. The post 1945 era saw many wars fought between and within states. The non-state actors were known as guerrillas or terrorists. A theory of guerrilla warfare was produced by for the first time by Lawarence of Arabia in his “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1926). To him the guerrillas ought to operate “like a cloud of gas”. Most of the time they should be inactive and invisible, hiding in places too far away and inaccessible to be reached by their larger opponents. They should also rely on higher mobility and avoid close clashes with the enemys main body.

It was hard to fit terrorism and guerrilla warfare into the accepted Clausewitzian framework. Nor did this new kind of war offer space for high concentration of troops and huge battles. This resulted in that after 1945, all generals works on the art of war has devoted a separate chapter to guerrilla warfare. After 1990s Clausewitz theories began to show its lacks. They proved incapable of incorporating warfare by or against non-state actors since he saw war as a mere continuation of politics.

At the beginning of this new millenium, two separate visions are beeing debated. One of them still sticks to the theories of Clausewitz. It states that was will continue to be used only as an instrument of politics at the hand of one state against another.
The other school argues that the nuclear war has brought the large-scale warfare to an end. If nuclear weapons are not used, then the larger warfare is finished and if the are used then it will already be finshed.

There are also speculations of potential substitutes for conventional warfare. One of these are “information warfare” carried out in what is known as cyberspace. This kind of war can be as deadly as nuclear war and carried out by anone who is in possession of electronic equipment and some knowledge of electronics and computers. Perhaps will the conduct of war be handled by hackers trying to inflitrate the computers and lines of communications of the enemy. Other speculations claims that war will not be waged between states but between organizations. War will no longer be about winning territories, but rather about conquering.