Despite its own extensive experience in nontraditional wars, the United States has rarely excelled at this portion of the conflict spectrum in the past half century. Its current conventional military superiority will ensure that it gets much more experience in today's Small Wars Century, an era that began in the 1950s with the rise of revolutionary warfare. For several decades, thanks in large part due to lingering myths from the Vietnam war, this area has been a conceptual and intellectual orphan in US professional military institutions. Without understanding the past, and how new conditions impact the relevance of this experience as a guide, US military planners and policy makers will be unable to translate America's intentions into effective campaigns. Without a sound grasp of history and the characteristics of nontraditional war as part of the overall social phenomena of war, the US will continue to find its overwhelming military dominance irrelevant to its most pressing security interests.