Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
It just seems allot easier to look backwards and say - there was the culmination point where it was set in stone, then to say "here, is the culmination point". It may have just been the way I read it, and what interested me in the article - but I saw general Scales as pondering the possibilities and raising the questions of how culmination points come into being, how rivals see their selves, what does it mean in the broader perspective, what does that mean to policy, etc. I don't think Lee saw Gettysburg as a culmination point for his army - I'd argue he thought he had a shot right up to the end - he just needed the opportunity to make it happen. I'd argue that Grant did not see Lee as having culminated either until Lee had conceded by correspondence. Part of it has to do with those analogies - duels on larger scales, poker games, extreme sports, wrestlers etc - but with the highest stakes in the outcome.

I think its worthwhile to think about because it gets to how we make military and political decisions in war. I mean the threads gotta go where the thread goes - but that is what interested me.
Rob,

I'd say it is easier to see a culmination point in hindsight because it is a form of explanatory description rather than a form of predictive description. I should probably explain what I mean here. We use the word "why"
in two different ways--in one case we are describing what has happened after the fact --this is what happens with the Perry Mason chain of reasoning that justifies our making the assertion, "I now know that Colonel Mustard killed Mr. Body in the Library with the lead pipe." In the second case, we try to extrapolate from a current point into the future--this is the predictive description. Its outcome would be, "I now know that Col Mustard will kill Mr. Body in the Library with the lead pipe."

Warfare, like most human activities, is at best multicausal. (I suspect part of it is purely accidental.) It has some regularity, but not sufficient regularity to enable one to predict outcomes with any degree of confidence. We can usualy reconstruct events and provide an explanation after the fact. There are just too many independent variables to afford us the same luxury for accurately predicting outcomes involving creatures who are capable of changing their minds.