No matter where we go today, we are in some ways heavily influenced by the perception that there is either conventional conflict or counter-insurgency. The reality is that the conflict scenarios produce a level of asymmetry that you talked about, where the threats can vary, so that at any time we could encounter a threat from a near-peer, that is, somebody who is capable of an armoured manoeuvre, has armoured fighting vehicles, and has the capacity to inflict great damage, all the way down to insurgent-type activity in that environment. So we expect to be going into that scenario.
The term we coin is “full-spectrum operations”. We have to be able to do a little bit of that every time we go out the door; then we simply shift as required to meet that challenge. We do train soldiers, and I remember my own training. We looked at behaviour patterns and what were the tell-tale signs. I can't go into a great deal of detail as to how we do that, but we use a consistent process in-theatre where we are continuously watching and trying to develop what we think are the enemy's tactics, techniques, and procedures, how they're going to conduct an operation. Then we inform our soldiers. This is a daily process. “What did you see?” “Well, I saw this, I saw that, here's what happened.” We try to train our soldiers about the things to look for. Even on my last tour as a general officer in Kabul, I was particularly aware of that , because I was in a different area of operation with a different group that used a different methodology to prosecute its attacks. So we continually seek to do that.
It will be no different going into any other theatre. We would look for those kinds of signs. That's simply part of our training.