The Marine Corps Four-Star General James N. Mattis currently serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and also as commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command—titles that were surely announced in a PowerPoint presentation somewhere. More accessibly, from what I can tell by bouncing around the Web, he will be depicted by Harrison Ford in the forthcoming movie “No True Glory: The Battle For Fallujah,” which may be released later this year, based on the book by former-Marine-turned-journalist Bing West. Mattis is not a tall man, and his grey hair is trimmed tightly; his ears protrude a little, in a manner pioneered by President Obama and, before him, Mr. Spock. He speaks in a blunt and unvarnished fashion not typical of general officers on staff assignments at the Pentagon.

Mattis is an important intellectual ally of U.S. Army General David Petraeus, the champion of counterinsurgency doctrine, which has migrated from the fringes of U.S. military thinking to dominance. Within that field these days, a hot topic is what is generally referred to as “hybrid warfare,” meaning conflicts where U.S. forces and their opponents may have to move seamlessly in the same theatre and even on the same day among counterterrorism operations, humanitarian-relief efforts, and formal artillery duels. The term first sprang up within U.S. military circles to describe the lessons of Israel’s unsuccessful contest with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Since then, as an idea, it has taken on a life of its own, aided by the very nature of its hybridness—that is, it is a phrase that can be used to describe many different things at once.

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies today, Mattis turned up to give an address as part of a series of meetings C.S.I.S. has organized to support the Obama Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, a strategy document due in the next several months. Today’s subject was irregular warfare, and I was there to talk on a panel following Mattis’s speech. He began by observing that the worldwide conventional military superiority enjoyed by the United States had caused its opponents to migrate into irregular formations, embedding and dispersing themselves in civilian populations, and innovating in media strategy. “We shouldn’t be offended” by this evolution, he said; it is part of the natural way that people who wage war adapt to avoid their opponent’s strengths.

In describing the recent intellectual history of Pentagon thinking about irregular war, Mattis cited Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon in 2006, and the events in Georgia and South Ossetia last summer. “The signposts have come into focus,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of those signposts right now.” With its vast conventional military superiority in the air, on the open seas, and in conventional tank and artillery war, the challenge facing the U.S. military, Mattis argued, is that “we must avoid being dominant and irrelevant.”

He observed that the United States lacks a Grand Strategy for the world it confronts today, although he conceded, “It’s hard to write a grand strategy when your house is on fire.” Without mentioning the name of Donald Rumsfeld, he explained that Pentagon thinkers had recently overestimated the potential of technological solutions. “We engaged in some wishful thinking,” he said. He continued, “We have to diminish the idea that technology is going to change warfare…War is primarily a human endeavor.”

On today’s battlefield, linked technologies are so pervasive that soldiers conducting routine patrols are in constant real-time audio—and sometimes video—contact with their superiors, who watch over operations as they occur, with lawyers and civilian policymakers sometimes at their sides, issuing orders and advice from afar. The advantage of these all-seeing systems is that they can ensure that violent operations are carefully reviewed and calibrated before they occur. Mattis, however, clearly thinks that these systems are depriving soldiers, noncommissioned officers, and junior officers of the independence and initiative they need to operate effectively in places like Afghanistan.

He said that when he served as a young officer in Europe during the Cold War, he and his colleagues knew they could not turn on their radios during prospective combat because the Soviets would immediately be able to identify their position and attack. They would have to operate on their own, in silence.

“We have not turned off a radio once in the last eight years of operations,” he went on. “We may have raised a generation of young soldiers who may have learned all the wrong lessons.”

Mattis said he is “not a Luddite” but, in fact, his reading of how pervasive networked technology will play out in the future, even in relatively unplugged environments like Western Pakistan, may nonetheless be tinged with some old-school nostalgia. Once this sort of technology is established, it is hard to reduce its effects on perception and culture. In the suburbs a generation ago, for example, we went off on our bicycles, built our secret forts, threw around our rocks and sticks, and carried from parental authority vague directions to be home by sunset—but we were secure in the knowledge that we might be difficult to find if we strayed. Today parenting is like those Nextel commercials—no stray thought or anxiety passes without a cell-phone or messaging check. So it is on the battlefield.

“That’s no longer going to work,” Mattis argued. He quoted Petraeus as saying that the U.S. military must “decentralize to the point of discomfort…Technical systems will come under attack and will go down.” When they do, only “commander’s intent” will be there to guide soldiers and officers in the field.

His emphasis on a better educated, more articulate, more independent soldier trained to handle such circumstances is hard to dislike. Whether the Pentagon can actually create such a force seems another matter. Mattis called for civilian leaders to take responsibility for the prospective quality of the all-volunteer military. He also trotted out a line I’d heard before, but have not stopped enjoying: “I don’t write policy; I just execute the last six hundred meters of it.”