End Of Year Super Blog

The Long War is entering a new decade and its time for long range forecasting. Imagine a map of central Asia. Draw a line from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan up into northern Afghanistan. This is an active retreat line for the Taliban that is seeing heavy traffic as I write. Now extend the line up into Uzbekistan. This probably is also an active retreat line and is seeing very light traffic. Obviously the Great Jihadist Strategic Retreat or Great Retreat has begun.
Fast forward several years and I forecast the jihadist retreat line snakes through half of Uzbekistan and all of Kazakhstan to terminate in the Caspian Sea. By this time Afghanistan will be essentially pacified.
On the other side of the Caspian Sea another battle line is drawn from Russia's Dagestan province and into the Caucasus region. Like a candle burning at both ends there is a drone air campaign and a small ground war at either end of this line. The southernmost part of Uzbekistan is the American end and Chechnya is Russia's end. So there are two mirror image wars with drones ranging hundreds of miles out from the ground fighting. Probably American and Russian drones will overlap to some degree or maybe the sea in the middle will mark a boundary for either country's drones.
The picture I am painting is similar to what we see today except now there is only one small land war (in Afghanistan) and one drone campaign (in tribal Pakistan). In the future there will be two. Let's call these land and drone campaigns LAD campaigns or LADs. While one LAD is run by the Russian government and the other by the US government, there will be an integrated global surveillance web run by the US that Russia has access to. As they win battles and push bad guys into further retreat the two LADs move closer together along the jihadist battle line that connects them just as Russian and American armies moved toward a central point (Berlin) in WW II. Russo-American LAD co-operation will be better than WW II.
While all this is happening there will be Long War activity on the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. Combat there will produce higher casualties and actually be much hotter than in central Asia. The African theater will, however, generate much fewer headlines than the other one, a situation true today. The African theater will be structured like central Asia with two LADs moving together along a jihadist battle/retreat axis. At its longest the African line reaches from Yemen to the fringes of the Sahara Desert. There will be a separate integrated surveillance web over Africa and the Arabian peninsula. It will link information into a single web from every satellite and drone in the theater and any good guy can instantly gain access.
Assuming my forecast is accurate, there are stock market implications in all this. Example: ITT just bought a small surveillance company with the express purpose of getting a leg up in the architecture of the Long War web.
One final point, I've written blogs suggesting that the Long War could last hundreds of years. The above scenario would call for a shorter timeframe, maybe 50-100 years.