Why counterfactual history clarifies real decisions

A counterfactual is useful when it changes a specific decision while keeping the surrounding strategic pressures in view. Asking what Britain might have done with a 14-inch gun helps reveal why it selected the historical 13.5-inch and 15-inch paths. The consequences then propagate into German and American responses, later gun development, and possible treaty limits. The imagined sequence is not inevitable, and the simulation cannot show what would certainly have happened. Varying one choice instead exposes the industrial, technological, and diplomatic factors that constrained the real one.