While the Americans are beginning to realise that the future of war they envisioned is every day increasingly resembling the colonial wars of yesterday, at least in Iraq, theses that take account of cultural factors are slowly taking over from the purely Clausewitzian theories of armed conflict and their avatar, the all-mighty ‘technology does it all’. Network-centric warfare, which was to abolish space and make a break with massive armies, has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq. If wars against terrorism have to be supported by networks, they are not exactly those that the theoreticians of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ had in mind.