Abstract
As we have seen in Introduction by the editors, this volume is concerned with looking anew at contemporary military action or, in other words, the work of armed forces in theater. This epilogue argues for the vitality of this perspective by making fairly simple observations regarding both what is lacking in our existing knowledge and what is present and new in these collected chapters. The bottom line, which we might as well skip to now, concerns the special alchemy of the two words “mission” and “formation”. An interrogation of missions, rather than functions or ecologies, strikes me as enormously productive and is most compelling when coupled with an analytically open approach to “formations”.