In my first couple of years of University I had a couple of argments with people about what warfare in the future would look like ... I said it would be very different because the large (powerful) nations would always avoid conflict with eachother, and they would (generally speaking) try to limit wars between smaller nations, so you would see small organizations who were not affiliated with any country attack large nations using unconventional methods to make a statment.
Now, until September 11th 2001, I always envisioned it as being very small scale strikes like were seen in Ireland or Israel and assumed that terrorists were not organized enough to handle anything larger.
Personall, I have always doubted that Al Qaeda exists in the form we're lead to believe because I think it is far more likely that you would have 1,000 tiny terrorist agencies than 1 large terrorist organization. Beyond that, I think that September 11th was a wake up call to the western world about the real threats they faced, and the United States woke up on the wrong side of the bed and was grumpy.
