agreed. there's a lot you can learn from "business as war" analogies -- when I was doing competitive strategy at Microsoft I worked a lot with Robert Greene, who sent me an early copy of a chapter from his "33 strategies of war" about how FDR got his allies into key positions throughout the government in order to transform things organizationally. It was extremely useful, and books like Robert's and Sun Tzu's should be mandatory reading for anybody doing strategy at a large company (or small company that wants to grow large).
But yeah, the analogy breaks down at some point. Yes, there are billions of dollars at stake here ... but in the real world, soldiers put their lives on the line and civilians get caught up as collateral damage.
In the 1990s it may well have helped contribute to an attitude where nobody stopped to think whether business practices are anti-competitive.
It also contributed to some really horrible software. At one point in the early 2000s I was meeting with Windows architects about one highly-vulnerable part of IE that was causing all kinds of security grief, and the challenges of rewriting it because its API was badly crafted. Somebody explained it like this: "You've got to understand the history. We took a lot of short cuts because we wrote it during a war."
But yeah, the analogy breaks down at some point. Yes, there are billions of dollars at stake here ... but in the real world, soldiers put their lives on the line and civilians get caught up as collateral damage.