only made possible by the rise of the first city-state's in mesopotamia about five dozen years ago. by definition you could not have a conventional army without. until you have states had no conventional armies which had officers and enlisted ranks and bureaucracy and logistics' and all these other things we associate with conventional armed forces. guess what? as soon as you have the very first city-state's in mesopotamia there were immediately being attacked by nomads from the persian highlands, essentially a religious. and so from the very start organized militaries have always spent a lot of their time fighting unconventional your regular warfare. you know what, those terms don't make a heck of a lot of sense. that is one of the big takeaways that i have from doing six years of reading and research for this book. the way we think about this entire subject is all messed up. we think that somehow conventional warfare is the norm, that the way you want to fight is how these conventional armies slug it out in the open. the reality is, those have always been the exception. just think

agriculture sparked the development of the world's first cities in places like sumer in ancient mesopotamia. but how did farming begin in the new world ? when scotty macneish first came to the tehuacan valley in 1962, he was seeking the answer to one simple question -- did agriculture evolve here or was it introduced from the old world ? then we'll measure out from the corners. keach: in a stratum of the purron cave that had been laid down thousands of years later than those in which he found the hunters and gatherers, macneish made a discovery that exceeded all expectations. macneish: this is a corn cob, and it's a real little one. keach: it may have looked insignificant, but the shriveled ear dated to about 5000 b.c. it was the earliest evidence of farming ever discovered in the new world. since corn is a staple crop, it would have allowed a nomadic hunting/gathering way of life to evolve into a settled agricultural one. corn slowly evolved in the new world from tiny ears, like the one macneish discovered, to the size we know today. like staple crops of the old world, such as wheat and ba

[por megáfono] ¡caballos de mesopotamia, serpientes venenosas...! ¡fuff! ¡pisss!os millones de pesetas de multa? que por cierto te los di yo. sí. "sanseacabó". pues no, no "sanseacabó" don pablo, porque resulta que ahora van y me dicen que soy... ¡huy qué calor! así que soy un representante legal de construcciones nueva york, por lo tanto no está zanja'o. a ver si te lo metes a la cabeza, antoñito. no te preocupes porque no hay nada contra ti, absolutamente nada. que sí don pablo porque si soy el representante legal de la empresa voy a tener que pagarlo todo como si no hubiera pagado yo, suficiente. ah, eso es pura burocracia. con la burocracia, pues como siga la burocracia se va a enterar que ya esta al tanto. y si sigues gritando se va a enterar toda la gente que está aquí. esto no es el bar de tu barrio, antoñito. mira antonio, yo te entiendo. [vertiendo] ¡ssshhh! es normal que estés nervioso porque no tienes experiencia en estas cosas, pero yo... qué te voy a contar todo quedará en agua borrajas. ¿qué te pueden hacer a ti? reclamarte $50 millones de pesetas. ¿

conventional warfare is a relatively recent invention that only our rose about 5 under years ago in mesopotamia -- 500 years ago. what was the last conventional conflict that we have seen? 2008 when russia invaded georgia. there are thousands of people dying in countries like afghanistan, a rock, syria, -- mali. these are not conventional wars . we should not be surprised it has ever been thus and it will hus.ys pabe t they are the norm. we better be ready for the kind of wars we're seeing now. we're not going to be out of the business of fighting insurgencies. host: how is the u.s. military doing? how does the military prepare itself for future wars of this kind? guest: the u.s. military has not done well in preparing for this kind of conflict. they focus on mirror-image adversary. we paid a heavy price in vietnam iraq.ghanistan adnd they have transformed themselves over the past decade. the innovation is coming from the grassroots level. they have transformed the way we fight. the military has become a superb in counterinsurgency. my concern is we will repeat the same mistake that we made aft