Military intelligence — not your father’s oxymoron: How did I miss this convention? Sounds like a real good time was had by all, and if all the panels were as productive of outside-the-box thinking as the one on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency operations, then I could just kick myself. Here are some of the more insightful comments:

“I don’t see conventional challenges to be dominant for a long time,” said Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History. “Our enemies are going to make us fight this kind of war until we get it right,” Crane said. “This is our future.”

‘Our enemies are going to make us fight this kind of war until we get it right.’

“This is revolutionary” — building democracies and helping them establish capitalist economies and open and public police forces and judicial systems, said Kalev Sepp, assistant professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, Calif. “The mission is too broad to put on the shoulders of the military alone,” he said. “It has to be interagency.”

“We will not prevail with the force of arms alone,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, agreed.

“We are much closer to the beginning than the end of this long conflict,” he said, emphasizing the need for public support and financial backing to ensure the mission succeeds.

“Ultimately, victory requires a national strategic consensus, evident in both words and actions,” Schoomaker said. “While such a common strategic foundation, understood and accepted by the American people, existed during the Cold War, … it is not yet evident that such common understanding exists today.”