In the nineties of the last century, the world breathed a sigh of relief when the end of the so-called cold war. The euphoria was high, there were opinions that the world was safe from now on. It seemed that the military potential of states was losing importance as it was redundant in the face of the announced conflicts of an economic nature. Time was showed, that nothing could be more wrong. Really the conflicts on the East-West did not last for several decades, but they were replaced by other threats, the source of which was mainly the politics between the Western and the countries of the Middle East. The resulting painful experiences have mercilessly shown that it is impossible to take effective efforts to ensure the security of a modern state without taking care of its military potential. The aim of the article is to point out the contemporary determinants of the perception of present warfare. The result of the objective formulated in this way was to define a research problem in the form of a question: how is warfare in the first two decades of the 21st century perceived? The research used a holistic approach, which stems from the assumption that phenomena and situations are considered in a comprehensive manner. A systemic approach was used to solve the research problem, which served in particular: the study of phenomena as a whole, taking into account their characteristics and characteristic values, and determining the diversity of internal relations (Sienkiewicz, 1993, pp. 63-65). An important research method was the analysis of literature relating to the issues of military operations, contemporary threats to the state and security theory, as well as the study of normative and legal documents in the field of considerations. In the course of accompanying research, theoretical methods (mainly analysis, synthesis and inference) were used, which were used in the analytical and conceptual work. The results of the conducted research were formulated with the use of inference.