What counterfactual naval history can reveal

How useful is working through counterfactual situations to see how differently events might unfold?

Useful when the scenario stays within a tightly constrained chain of consequences and accounts for economic, political, social, technological, cultural, industrial, and logistical limits.

Analytical counterfactuals follow tighter limits than fiction. A war-studies rule permits one historical change and roughly one further logical step; beyond that, assumptions compound faster than the evidence can support. A credible naval scenario has to account for dockyards, trained workers, money, politics, culture, technology, and logistics before granting a state new forces. Red Storm Rising can still inspire strategic exercises even though it is a fictional Cold War scenario rather than a forecast. The method stops a what-if exercise when the supporting historical chain becomes too speculative.