When I joined the Army in 1981, Warfare was Warfare, is still is …… Warfare…… but has many cousins now. The cousins never stand together and it very difficult get a clear picture of the entire clan. The first cousins to arrive were: Conventional Warfare and Unconventional Warfare. There are many descriptions, and the best is: • Conventional warfare is stale, attritional and inappropriate to the challenges of the modern era. The Small Wars Journal • And, Unconventional warfare: typically refers to a range of military and paramilitary operations that are not part of conventional warfare (Oh!! hence the use of Un). This can include guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and insurgency………. World War II had all of these so did the Indo Pak Wars and others ………. what has changed? I then started looking for the thin line that separated the two. A sentence from the ‘War Room’ of a ‘Superpower War College’ muddled the issue further: In modern warfare, the lines between regular, conventional and irregular, unconventional warfare are increasingly blurred. This statement interestingly adds a twist. It allows ‘Examiners’ of the ‘Worldwide Military Examiners Group to fish for ‘Red Herrings’ in the blurred waters. For the sake of preventing further confusion, I will exclude the forms of Warfare that get associated with ‘Domains’ i.e Land Warfare, Air Warfare, Sea Warfare, Space Warfare and Cyber Warfare from the puzzle discussion. Souring Temperatures, Unlimited Power Cuts, Neighbours Dog and the ‘Warfare Puzzle’ kept me awake all night. Close to dawn was a veni, vidi, vici moment – the rapidly expanding ‘Glossary of Warfare’ my sixth sense told me is a game being played on the ‘Staff Course’ aspirants worldwide to later tell them that they all passed on grace marks because the @@@@@ Warfare was not the ######## Warfare that the examiner had asked. A niggling thought. If an examiner states that “the response to this question was “Below Average” should the aspirants be blamed or the examiner who had invented the ques or dug it out of a ‘yank’ document. Back to the Warfare Puzzle…… One such recent exam question spoke of the Irregular Warfare (IW). Examiner’s comment later clarified that this IW did not stand for the Information Warfare that we are quite familiar with but Irregular Warfare; obviously the confusion had been created …….. and ……. had to be clarified. It was further stated: “It was expected that the offrs would first give a brief intro about this form of conflict. It is amorphous and faceless and the national bdys have become diffused. Asymmetric and hybrid nature was also supposed to be brought out. Many and small beats little and Large and that Swarming could be the new method of Surging”. Not understood ……… have you? The Emerging trends of IW (Irregular Warfare) were listed as: “Remote Control War, No Contact War, War of Collusion, Cyber Warfare/ Digital Warfare, 4th Gen / Asymmetric Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, Small but Radical Wars, Synergised and Simultaneous War in All Six Domains, Media & Social Media Warfare, Economic Warfare”. ……… But wait, isn’t this all – Grey Zone Warfare? ……… I got the answer from https://irregularwarfare.org/ – The main distinction between the two is that irregular warfare simply uses more violence than competition…………Wah! I think it is best to conclude before it becomes overbearing: In the real world warfare remains unchanged: Brilliance of the Senior Commanders, Leadership of the Junior Leaders and Sacrifice of the Troops. Bakeee Sabh Angrezee