From Wikipedia:

The Long War is a name for the United States' War on Terrorism. While President George W. Bush has referred to "a long war", others in the administration have referred to it as "the Long War", thus putting the conflict, at least terminologically, on the same level as the 50-year Cold War.

In 2004, U.S. Army General John Abizaid, the Central Command chief who oversees military operations in the Middle East, began using it to refer to the struggle against al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups.

In April 2005, James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-published a book titled Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom.

In September 2005, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Myers, used it during his final news conference to say that political and economic measures, not just military ones, would be needed.

It appears to have become a Bush Administration policy to refer to the "Long War." U.S. President George W. Bush himself first used the new name in his 2006 State of the Union speech: "Our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy."

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDRR) of the U.S. Department of Defense headlines the section on the war's longterm goals with "Fighting The Long War". The report's preface starts with the phrase: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

The notion of a "long war" on terrorism

Upon the release of the 2006 QDRR, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reframed the war on terrorism as "a generational conflict akin to the Cold War" that might last decades. The report seeks to address the major security challenges of the next 20 years, emphasizing profound changes to the U.S. military to make it more flexible and more suited to engage in unconventional and asymmetric warfare.

A Guardian article states that 'the report exposes the sheer ambition of the US attempt to mastermind global security'. "The US will work to ensure that all major and emerging powers are integrated as constructive actors and stakeholders into the international system. It will also seek to ensure that no foreign power can dictate the terms of regional or global security."'[1]

The 2006 QDRR identifies four key areas:

• Defeating terrorist networks
• Defending the homeland in depth
• Shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads
• Preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction [2]

I've been hearing this more and more lately, and it is a better descriptor, I think than the War on Terror, which has always seemed to me the type of thing you would call trying to put down a local insurgency group.

But this is different. What is going on is multi-level, multi-national, confessional and idealogically based, that uses the whole world as its battlefield, all humans as potential participants, even when they consider themselves non-combatants. It is a struggle between a certain view of Islam and the West, a struggle between Sunni and Shia, a struggle at times between governments and their citizens, often involving religious ideology and corruption, cultural wars within the West as well as the East. And in the long run, it will leave none of us untouched.

Long war, I suspect, indeed.