"... just read the essay and must say your criticism is off the mark and comes across as personal - although a flawed essay, it raises interesting points, points which no doubt will be raised with increasing frequency as the West's views of the nature of war and the best uses of a military continue to fray and possibly start to conflict with the reality of an emergent China kicking it old school - which was the point about Cortes that for some inexplicable reason you utterly missed.
And you make the classic mistake viz Clausewitz and politics by seeming to assume that what old Clauzy meant by politics is in any way related to what we mean by politics - politics for Clauzy was grand strategy - he would have had no idea what to make of the woman who saw on YouTube a video of a marine shooting a puppy and therefore voted against Bush - when the author wonders about the possible negative effects of politics on the military ethos he's speaking about the puppy.
And what's your problem with counterfactual arguments? They were good enough for Socrates so I imagine there's something to them. There's nothing wrong with me asking the question 'what would happen if we dropped a couple of armored divisions into Afghanistan tomorrow?' - of course that can't and won't happen, but that doesn't mean that certain elements of the argument over the whys and wherefores of Afghanistan are not illuminated by asking it - which is how the author used counterfactuals in the essay.
And the carnage of WWI was not about mindless ritual as you seem to want to claim - it was about the failure by some or many to understand or act on the understanding that the effects of the industrial revolution had changed the practice of war..."
