It's a cute analogy, but like all analogies it breaks after inspection. One might try and salvage it by observing that military "best practice" in the field and

It's a cute analogy, but like all analogies it breaks after inspection. One might try and salvage it by observing that military "best practice" in the field and Best Practice at HQ need not be, and commonly are not, the same, either for reasons of scope or expediency. Moreover, lower case "practice" tends to win more, more quickly. Eg guerillas tend to win battles quickly against hidebound formal armies. For a startup, winning "battles, not wars," is what you need, because you have finite resources and have an exit in mind before you burn through them. For a large enterprise, "winning wars not battles" is important because you have big targets on your back (regulators, stock market, litigation). One might paraphrase the whole shooting match with the ever-pithy statement that premature optimization is the root of all evil.