Timo,
There is no disagreement between us: both “organization” ( in a larger sense of the word) of the military as well as the weapons at its disposal are important. My point is that they mutually influence each other and should be compatible to be fully effective in their common goal: the “ways”( tactic) and “means” (instrument).
Inverting your example of assegais used as stabbing weapons without proper organizing principle one can imagine what would have happened had Chaka’s Impis , properly deployed and trained, used their iklwas as hurling weapons from a conventional distance :-) The whole idea was to make spears utterly unusable as hurling implements, to force the fighters to engage in the face-to- face confrontation. For that, spear heads had to become massive to inflict maximal damage and the shafts short enough to make them unusable for hurling, in fact converting a traditional assegai to a stabbing sword analogous of gladius.
Thus, only a marriage of trained Impis with a weapon suitable for their optimal function could assure final success.
In modern times tanks, initially imagined as self-propelled movable cannons/ machine guns, mutated into highly mobile analogs of heavy cavalrymen capable of converting static trench defense into dynamic attack force. Again, a revolutionary idea of aggressive maneuverability coupled to a proper instrument.
Six foot tall English bows would be unsuitable for Mongolian light cavalry, but the absence of its mobile tactic would be equally unsatisfactory despite massive use of long distance nomadic bows.
In different circumstances the primacy of the chicken vs. the egg could be switched: sometimes the ways dictated the means, sometimes vice versa. But the general principle of their mutual compatibility remained inviolable.
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