Combat as aprogramming metaphor is indeed interesting. Some thoughts for you: Soviet Military Doctrine was to "attack along organizational divisions" so for instance the Fulda Gap was the expected site of WWIII as that was the dividing line between the US and British Forces. This meant that they would exploit the inablity of the opposing forces to communicate with each other. Also the the Soviet Doctrine was "a full speed ahead" strategy. With troops (armor etc) moving at high speeds, Nato doctrine was the "sponge" (backed up by action point lines.) So while the soviets would try to go as fast as possible through the opposition (while exploiting poor coms between organizational units) the NATO strategy was to wait for them to pass through the lines then attack them from the sides and back. They didnt try to outright prevent the Sovs from getting through, they would essentially let them go and then get them in their vulnerable behind instead. All of this was backed up by a tactical nuclear posture that stated that if the Soviets crossed certain lines the response would be to turn much of Germany into a nuclear wasteland.

Personally I can see various aspects of these strategies in software development. The place where your development efforts are going to go wrong is when you have poor comms because of organizational "ownership". Sometimes its no good trying a strong defence against various issues, instead its better to structure your systems for graceful failure followed by preventitive shut down.

No doubt you could work these metaphors further... Anyway, nice node. ++ to you.