The long war

In 2004, ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer warned in a BBC interview:

Mr Scheuer said US policies risked "an extraordinarily long and bloody war" against al-Qaeda.

It seems he was unintentionally prescient. The Pentagon recently embraced the term "long war". No longer merely a war on terror, a term criticized as merely an attack upon a technique, the scope has expanded to a global scale of indefinite duration.

US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces...
Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: "When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades."

They're going to have to innovate further with regard to ideological warfare. The USSR ultimately collapsed because it could not economically sustain its military-industrial complex. Such restrictions do not directly apply to transnational 4GW threats.

Further in the piece:

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.
The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate "an indirect approach", building and working with others, and seeking "to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

That's asymmetric warfare by another name. Psychological unbalancing also hints at Boyd's strategy.

An effective pilot explodes his rival's comfortable view of the universe. With his familiar clues hopelessly scrambled, a rival under pressure will usually try to interpret the mess from his accustomed perspective. While the confused rival struggles ... the savvy pilot quickly executes yet another set of maneuvers, once more scrambling the parts and further feeding his opponent's confusion. Ultimately, Boyd wrote, the winner "collapses his [adversary's] ability to carry on." You win the competition by destroying your opponent's frame of reference.

That being said, how does one collapse the reference frame of global Islamist extremist, a transcendant ideology due to its religious basis? In contrast, communism was merely a materialist ideology, and thus directly subject to falsification via the scientific method.