Picking up where Alach left off is Anna Simons, 21st Century Cultures of War - Advantage Them (2013, NPS, 64 pp.), whose title answers the "Cortes" question - the contemporary Flower Warriors will fare as badly as the Aztecs.

INTRODUCTION

This paper aims to sound two alarms. First, about “them.” We Americans have long assumed many non-Westerners are more primitive, less advanced, and ultimately less capable than we are. This is a mistaken view. Not only are many much more sophisticated than we realize, but they are especially adept in the realm of social relations, which has never been our strong suit.

Consequently, one challenge we face is that in much the same way our technological prowess led the Soviets to overreach (and thus the Soviet Union to collapse), non-Westerners’ ability to outmaneuver us in the field of social relations will lead us to continue to overextend ourselves. And worse, we won’t achieve clear wins. In writing this I do not mean to imply that our overreach will be purposely orchestrated by any one actor or set of actors, although that remains a distinct possibility. Rather, people abroad (and here at home, working on behalf of people abroad) will continue to seek U.S. military assistance for a host of reasons, both venal and legitimate, and the effects will continue to be cumulatively corrosive. Just look at our current culture of war—which brings me to the second source of alarm: us.

Our technical ingenuity, our work ethic, and our productive capacity have long distinguished us. Engineering, one could say, is our forte. We Americans make things work. All of which would appear to stand our military in good stead. And indeed, until recently, our “can do,” problem-solving professionalism did advantage us. However, no longer. I write “no longer” because we no longer seem to want to apply our comparative strengths definitively. At the same time, “can do” overstates what we can accomplish. ...
On the issue of "Restrained warfare":

3) Restrained warfare. Since the advent of the Cold War, every “war” the U.S. has fought has been limited which, by definition, means restrained; we neither go all out nor commit our entire arsenal to winning. The U.S. has been able to wage limited wars thanks to our positioning and resources. No one can out-produce us. Geographically, we remain impossible to overrun. Better still, in every conflict since the Mexican War, we have fought “over there.”

This has been hugely significant. It means that we actually could have fought with less restraint had we so chosen, and that we are the ones who have decided to limit the nature of war. We like to think we have done so for ideological and moral reasons. But, on closer examination, this might be as much an artifact of the dawning of the nuclear age and the Cold War, coinciding with the luxury of no near-peer adversaries apart from the USSR. After all, no one we have fought against has really fought back: not Panamanians, Somalis, Serbs, or even the Iraqi Army.

World War II marks several watersheds. Among them, our rules of engagement have grown increasingly complicated and more discriminating, while non-Westerners increasingly target non-combatants. Or, as Zhivan Alach has put it, while “The West may be retreating toward restraint in warfare… non-Western actors may be charging headlong toward unrestrained methods.” Actually, the anthropologically correct observation would be that everyone demonstrates restraint—it is just that what constitutes restraint is cross-culturally contingent, and non-Westerners don’t apply the same brakes we do. Not only are non-Westerners who seize power bolder in what they are willing to do, but they exhibit no discernible remorse.

For obvious reasons, comity between a society’s conception of war and how combatants would fight if they were unconstrained is harder to achieve or maintain in democracies and heterogeneous states than in militarized (especially militarized tribally based) societies, which leads to yet another Western/non-Western rub.
...
... At least since WWII, policy makers in, and not just out of, the military have helped habituate the Services to regard fighting as a signaling device. Recall Vietnam—the U.S. bombed Hanoi to get the North Vietnamese to negotiate; bombing wasn’t done to force them to give up. Or more recently there is the example of Kosovo and our 79-day-long air war.
...
... Yet, treating war as a messaging device overlooks two truisms about the use of force. First, in Western/non-Western contests, miscommunication is all but guaranteed. We only deceive ourselves when we assume others understand, or will want to understand, or will not want to purposely misunderstand the intent in our messaging. Second, fighting never feels semiotic to those engaged in it.
On "Wile":

Wile requires at least four attributes:

1) the ability to identify that feature or set of features in an adversary’s culture that can be used as the fulcrum by, with, and through which to permanently alter conditions,

2) the ability to read all players so that you know how to appeal to, neutralize, and/or outwit each equally well,

3) an intuitive ability to tease, test, and probe so that you can make your own opportunities and don’t operate on others’ timeline(s), and

4) an appetite for twitting others, which means relishing the idea of turning the tables on adversaries in order to cause them to undo themselves.

At best, the most unconventional U.S. units today strive to “screw with others’ heads,” which they can generally do only after commanders figure out how to wrest the right authorities from the right agencies and bureaucracies. Then, should such individuals succeed at fusing their information operations, psyop, strategic communications, and operator capabilities to sow dissension and distrust, at best they can cause problems at the tactical and operational levels: they usually don’t have the wherewithal to strategically coordinate beyond their area of operations.

This is why to truly “screw with their heads” requires that commanders be able to apply wile: a) locally, b) coordinating across locations and over time, and c) supra-locally in order to both buy and control time.

Of course, to give the military its best shot at mastering a situation so that others can’t effectively maneuver it, or anything else, against us—to include youth, accidental guerrillas, or public sentiment—calls for unrestrained warfare. But, given current sensibilities, this hardly appears an option. Thus, seeking to “screw with others’ heads” provides one way to augment the use of force. Or, replace it.

However, we would make a massive, but classically American mistake, to assume that wile is something the military can either teach or train. William Donovan and the OSS recognized how uncommon an attribute wile is. They also realized it was a trait that needs to be selected for ...
Answering the quest for wily coyotes, Lindeman, Better Lucky Than Good - A Theory of Unconventional Minds and the Power of 'Who' (2009, NPS; Anna Simons was his thesis advisor) (161 pp.). IMO: His most material point:

B. THEORY OF AN UNCONVENTIONAL MIND

Simons suggests that succeeding in irregular warfare, especially when operating in foreign cultures and with “Others,” requires something that cannot be taught—or trained. The right “kind” of mind is necessary. She makes it clear that this is an important distinction. It is not temporal, like a frame of mind. It is a permanent kind of mind.[3] It’s an unconventional kind of mind.

To understand what an unconventional kind of mind is, it is important to first understand what a conventional kind of mind is. Given a conventional kind of mind, an individual’s ability to evaluate, process, and contend with new or different situations is bounded by domain and wedded to past actions. An individual with an unconventional kind of mind is not bound by these constraints. Someone with an unconventional kind of mind is capable of synthesizing across domains or innovating in order to solve problems while orienting and adapting to new circumstances or changing conditions.

This thesis posits that success in an irregular warfare environment requires individuals with an unconventional kind of mind; some individuals naturally think unconventionally, or irregularly, compared to everyone else. These individuals have a natural ability to, as Simons writes:

...intuitively think in terms of branches and sequels, and therefore don’t need to ask themselves what the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects of an action might be–they’ve already factored that in without consciously factoring it in. Or they have the ability to see angles from angles that remain obtuse to others.[4]
These are the first-stringers that America should be seeking to employ in irregular warfare.

3 & 4. Anna Simons and Mike Weathers, “Anthropology and Irregular Warfare – India,” (Unpublished paper, Naval Postgraduate School, 2008), 20-21.
All worth reading.

Regards

Mike