Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
The article makes a good point about the global warfare already underway, but is it really the WWI/WWII template that distracts people from considering today’s global warfare as WWIII? During the Cold War we all came to imagine WWIII as a sudden and total nuclear devastation brought about by conflicting superpowers. When people express relief that WWIII didn’t yet happen, they may mean “at least we didn’t all get nuked.”