Correctly developing the future force requires a sound understanding of how conflicts occur and are conducted under shifting international conditions and the relationship between military power and fiscal resources as the Nation pursues its security and other interests. Five specific contexts are presented as initial guides in future-force decisionmaking: contesting ideological conflict over global networks, defending the homeland and providing support to civil authorities, ensuring access to and protection of the global commons, protecting forward bases and partners or controlling key terrain, and stabilizing or isolating failed and failing states and ungoverned spaces. Using these considerations as a beginning will help ensure that our choices are both deliberate and optimal and will hold essential adversary resources and values at risk.