Abstract

The Author assumes that the present time could be conceived as a time of war, when war is the basic idea of every human activity, political position, future perspective. From this point of view, he analyses both the Western tracts on war - from Machiavelli to Clausewitz - and the Eastern one - particularly Chinese - in order to understand their «lessons» for contemporary war. The tracts on war produced by the 1970s are analysed to show how military power has been unable to face the conceptual and operative changes determined by the war on terrorism. It is suggested that conceptual innovations allowed justifying only the funding of expensive and inadequate projects and the «strategies of fear».