The biggest mistake people make about thinking about war is that decisions made about battlefield doctrine and adaption are necessarily evolutionary and rational since such a shocking loss of life is involved that inevitably an improvement in tactics will occur and successful strategies will not be unlearned unless they become ineffective.

This could not be further from the truth.

Just as every generation of journalists naive and aloof about learning the details and history of war claim authoritatively and breathlessly that “In this new era of warfare, the rules have changed and created a radical departure from the past!” every generation of soldiers, officers and generals who fight in wars develop their own set of maladapative beliefs, dogma and superstitions. Unlike the journalists however, the soldiers have an excuse as they are being subjected to life threatening situations they have little control over constantly and you can’t expect people to remain in that headspace forever without coping mechanisms beginning to erode the edges of their lucid thinking.

What fighting a war does to an authoritarian organization is continutally reduce the field of valid solutions to adversity until the only response is mindless, ineffective concentrated violence. The more this response catastrophically fails the more paradoxically other possible solutions are foreclosed in favor of pouring more resources into mindless, ineffective concentrated violence in an attempt to brute force the solution.

The root cause of this spiral is that as obsessed with violence as fascism is, it is still yet more fervently opposed to curiosity and intellectual thought and from that follows the axiom that fascism will always abandon military professionalism in favor of fighting in a way that embraces the hollow aesthetics of violence and dominance. Over and over and over and over again it is a perpetual motion cycle see Finnegans Wake for more details.