Counterfactual history must remain grounded in service experience. A weapon that enters service produces test results, exercises, maintenance experience, operating doctrine, and institutional preferences. Those observations shape the requirements and selection process for its successor. If the original system never serves, the evidence needed to infer that next design does not exist. A historian can trace the real inputs into the abandoned project, but should identify later generations as invention rather than pretend that they follow inevitably from history.
Notable Point · 1:09:50-1:11:52
Why counterfactual successors need a service history
Predicting the successor to a system that never entered service crosses from evidence-based counterfactual history into unsupported invention.