Is there an historical model for the Global War on Terror (GWT) such
that any lessons learned can be applied to the GWT?

Does the strategy and the tactics for dealing with the GWT resemble
any other past or present conflicts or contests?

Some *possible* examples:
the Cold War
the War on Drugs
Nineteenth Century Piracy on the high seas
Cattle rustling in the Olde West
the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland
Palestinian-Israeli issue
AIDS pandemic
Polio pandemic

This is interesting:

"[Niall] Ferguson turns to the nineteenth-century British Empire to
find a more apposite historical model for today's crisis. He describes
the spectacular rise and fall of Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi, a messianic
Sudanese Islamic fundamentalist whose soldiers stormed Khartoum in
1885, killing British General Charles Gordon along with the city's
other defenders. This attack, as Ferguson observes, was the 'September
11' of the era. And the British Empire hardly collapsed as a result.
Instead, the outraged British responded decisively to al-Mahdi's
provocation, and at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, ten thousand of
the rebels were wiped out by British Maxim machine guns. Meanwhile,
only a handful of British soldiers were killed. Sound familiar?

Building on this parallel, Ferguson argues that the United States
should now take a forceful leadership role in the world -- a role
similar to that played by the British Empire -- in order to counter
the growing forces of disorder."

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020301faessay8054-p30/peter-l-bergen/picking-up-the-pieces.html

This entire article is worth reading:

"Ernest May eventually wrote, with Richard Neustadt, a prescriptive
book called Thinking in Time, about ways in which people can learn
from history more successfully. The essential point was that no
episode in history is identical to any other, although they may share
certain patterns or be linked by one's leading to another. It is
important in every case to draw up a list of the resemblances to
events in the past?and also a list of the differences. Ho Chi Minh
resembled Hitler in being a tyrant; he differed in not seeking world
domination.

This reasoning led May to wonder about the implications of the Pearl
Harbor metaphor for the recent terrorist attacks. 'I was interested in
the extent to which the Pearl Harbor analogy popped into everyone's
mind right away,' he told me. 'I'm not really sure it's just because
of the similar element of surprise. It may also reflect the idea that
this, too, would be an experience that united us. I think people were
reaching for that. And in a way the most potent part of the analogy
was the one behind that?the immediate definition of the event as war.
That empowers a President to do things he might not do otherwise. But
it is also confining, because it conjures up the image of victory?an
image [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, cautioned
against.'

...Ernest May's latest book, Strange Victory, is about the Nazis'
lightning conquest of France in 1940. May told me he thinks of that,
too, as a useful analogy: 'The Germans thought very hard about what
were the procedural vulnerabilities on the other side. How the way
they did things made them vulnerable. Obviously, that's been done to
us in this case.'

May started running through other precedents and parallels?for
instance, the way Tom Ridge's new Office of Homeland Security
resembles efforts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to straighten out
bureaucratic snarls during World War II. But then he cautioned against
spending too much time in this pursuit."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/fallows.htm