So many opportunities to comment in your last post, but I will limit myself to two:
Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
The wicked words above are "known" facts, "real" reasons, "real" forms of governance, "real" ideologies, etc. (aka verifiable historical facts, which plague accurate re-enactments of historical events). They particularly plague one who believes (as I do) that the life of the military arts and the legal arts is not logic, but is experience.
History as re-enactment is central to the work of R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher who was also a practicing archeologist and historian of Roman Britain. However, his view of re-enactment is not simply what you may have seen had you been at Gettysburg at the beginning of this past July. He is rather obtuse in his description, but you might want to look at The Idea of History in your spare time.

Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
My principal argument with Whitman is that he seems to be saying (perhaps his book, when I get it, will clear that up) that the legal arts drove the military arts in the "era" of "Verdict by Battle". Generally, my argument is that the opposite is (should be) the norm - military law should be driven by the military arts. Yes, politics and policies also enter into that fray.
I tend to agree with you here. In fact, I think that this is analogous to what Thomas Kuhn had to say about paradigm shifts. Collingwood also has something to say about it in his discussions of metaphysics and philosophical method. 'Method', by the way, can also be replaced with 'logic' on at least one interpretation of the meaning of 'logic.'

I suspect that quite often we have changes in what we do (practice or, in the present context, military art) that occur quite unreflectively. After the fact, one may start to analyze the new practice and attempt to explain its efficacy (or lack thereof), which is the formation of the theory. In other words, theory may be logically prior to practice, but practice is quite often temporally prior to theory.
As an example, let's suppose near the end of a given campaigning season at some time in the distant past, a victorious commander decides to billet his army in the captured city rather than razing it, as was the prior custom. He discovers that he and his army have benefitted as a result (easier to keep campaigning, looting and pillaging next season because he still has his army at hand, perhaps). Based on this exerience, a new rule of conduct (military "law") is promulgated: "Do not destroy captured cities." (BTW, I doubt that just a single instance will suffice.) The final step would be for some legal theorists to generalize this new legal construct by mapping the law to a theory or building a new theory as to why not destroying captured cities instantiates some value of much broader application--like a right of innocent people to be safe in their property and possessions. Interestingly, to me at least, the original pragmatic motivation--the commander's desire to be able to start his next campaign sooner-- (if one existed at all) has been lost in the process.