The speech was a critical assessment of the prevailing U.S. military culture and the prism through which our Armed Forces see themselves.This prism clarifies what is important about the future and how we posture our forces for the future. Secretary Gates questioned that mindset and its hold on the Services and the Department of Defense's capitalization practices.Secretary Gates also declared that "the defining principle of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy is balance," 1 a principle that will also be key in the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This principle will force the critical examination of assumptions about the future, our understanding of threats, and their relative priorities. Gates emphasizes achieving a balance between our current conflicts and the Pentagon's penchant to plan toward more canonical, conventional scenarios. The Secretary believes that the Pentagon is devoted to postulated longer term challenges that have little to do with current conflicts and more likely threats. He used the term Next-War-itis to describe a prism that distorts the Services' ability to see military affairs clearly and objectively. The concept of balance is central to today's security debate, but it is a complex problem rather than a simple equation. To America's ongoing battles in Afghanistan and Iraq have highlighted limitations in our understanding of the complexity of modern warfare. Furthermore, our cultural prism has retarded the institutionalization of capabilities needed to prevail in stabilization and counterinsurgency missions.An ongoing debate about future threats is often framed as a dichotomous choice between counterinsurgency and conventional war. This oversimplifies defense planning and resource allocation decisions. Instead of fundamentally different approaches, we should expect competitors who will employ all forms of war, perhaps simultaneously. Such multimodal threats are often called hybrid threats. Hybrid adversaries employ combinations of capabilities to gain an asymmetric advantage.Thus, the choice is not simply one of preparing for long-term stability operations or high-intensity conflict. We must be able to do both simultaneously against enemies far more ruthless than today's.This essay widens the aperture of the current debate to account for this threat. It compares and contrasts four competing perspectives and evaluates them for readiness and risk implications. This risk assessment argues that the hybrid threat presents the most operational risk in the near-to midterm. Accordingly, it concludes that hybrid threats are a better focal point for considering alternative joint force postures.

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