The year 2021 proved a period of strategic inflection, a moment of standout changes in the character of geopolitical competition. Arguably, the last similar period of such strategic inflection began with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, what scholars and practitioners comfortably regard as a historic watershed event in international relations. Those attacks gave rise to what became known as the war on terror. Just as there was a great deal of uncertainty in 2001 of how best to prosecute a war on terror, there is now a great deal of uncertainty regarding how best to compete against peer and near-peer competitors who pose challenges in the current inflection. How to strike an effective strategic rebalance between those functional imperatives that have defined the war on terror and the imperatives of the coming era only further complicate the situation.