Leadership Quote by Susan Davis

“We must also recognize” is politician-speak that pretends humility while smuggling in authority: the speaker positions herself as the adult in the room, gently scolding an audience presumed to be clinging to outdated assumptions. The phrasing is careful, almost bureaucratic, but the intent is urgent. “New realities” does a lot of strategic work. It’s vague enough to avoid naming the most controversial elements of contemporary conflict, yet evocative enough to cue a whole catalog of anxieties: drone strikes, cyberattacks, insurgencies embedded in civilian life, propaganda wars, and the collapse of any clean line between “front” and “home.”

The subtext is policy permission. If war has changed, then the moral and legal frameworks governing it may need to bend. “Modern landscape of a battlefield” recasts the battlefield not as a place but as an environment - potentially everywhere, potentially permanent. That’s how you normalize expanded surveillance, flexible rules of engagement, new weapons procurement, and longer authorizations for use of force without ever saying “expanded power.” It’s a soft rhetorical move with hard consequences.

Contextually, the line sits comfortably in the post-Cold War/post-9/11 political vocabulary where leaders had to justify interventions that didn’t look like World War II set pieces. It’s also a hedge against criticism: if opponents argue for restraint or traditional constraints, they can be painted as naively nostalgic. The sentence’s restraint is the point; it’s calibrated to make adaptation feel inevitable rather than debatable.