The world is on the threshold of the Third World War. It’s hard to say what it will be like, but it’s certainly not the same as the last two. This is evidenced by documents from the US Department of Defense and the work of American military analysts included in this book. This will be a war without a front and rear, a war in which the “defending” side strikes before the aggressor attacks. And will this aggressor really exist? After all, as General D. Perkens said, “the tough confrontations of the future will be carried out in an unfamiliar environment and in an unfamiliar place. At the same time, the army will be confronted by unknown enemies, members of unknown coalitions.” And where there are “unknown enemies,” there are “strange wars”: not only armed combat on the traditional battlefield, but also confrontation in the sphere of diplomacy, internal political civil conflicts, behavioral, informational, financial, economic and technological confrontation - all have now become synonymous with the word “war” for Americans. On land and sea, in the air, space and cyberspace, the Pentagon intends to wage hybrid and proxy wars, asymmetric wars and counterinsurgency wars, which will now it is shameful to be called “conflict”, “confrontation”, “confrontation”. In fact, we are talking about the fact that humanity is entering a new era - the era of “world war”, or “war world”: “shadow wars”, as D. Barno called this state. What will it be like, the “war world” of the 21st century, in which many of us have to live and die - find out from this book. Many of the materials included in it are published in Russian for the first time.