Gian, I was struck by your statement about principles and lessons learned. While I would not use JMM's legal examples, I was bothered enough because my understanding of the word, principle, is less rigid than either yours or his. So I looked it up on dictionary.com and found a whole bunch (around 10) of definitions some of which accorded with both your understandings and some of which accorded with mine.

Now, we political (and other social) scientists have a solution for such semantic discrepancies. It is called "operational definition." Essentially, we define (or redefine) a word the way we want to use it and say to our interlocutors that if you want to talk to me about the subject of that word you had better be using my definition of it.

Since I think that you both are using relatively comparable definitions of principle I'll leave it to you to sort out the implications of your definition. But, I think, as well, that the way I use the term principle is somewhat different - a general rule that may be applied (must be applied) differently to the unique circumstances of an event (my operational definition). An example is the Principle of War called Economy of Force. I believe, therefore, that one can and should derive principles of this kind from the study of historical cases and rigorously adapt them (subject to constant revision like any plan) to circumstances that appear to be analogous - again after rigorous analysis and comparison. (This BTW is how I understand Neustadt and May's argument.) This is also my sense of how CSI sees the use of history in its studies of contemporary conflict and GWOT occasional papers series. But, then, I'm not sure how the academic historians would see this effort - as real history or something else entirely. From my poly sci vantage point, it makes good sense.

Cheers

JohnT