Besides being grossly unprofessional and misinformed, just why is that a relevant inquiry? - Charles E. Gannon

No matter which images of battle and carnage came to haunt him, no matter which specific terror rose up through them, the lessons they rehearsed were always the same:
There’s no such thing as certainty.
Control is an illusion.
Death and destruction descend the moment you forget to watch for them.
That was what two years of intermittent war had taught him. And once you learned those lessons, you didn’t just remember them: you lived them, moment to moment.

So, sighed Rulaine, we're pretty much screwed.
Yaargraukh's black eyes stared. "I do not understand your expression—'screwed?' This is a carpentry metaphor?"
Bannor almost smiled. "Not exactly.

And over the many months that followed, as Caine crept through both terrestrial and alien undergrowth on missions to reclaim some of the autonomy humanity had lost, he learned and relearned the prime lesson in common to all the shocks:
That all assumptions, like all plans, or never more than a second away from a catastrophic collision with reality.