Bret Devereaux

Non-sequitur. Just because humans are evolved for war doesn't mean that there is no reason to create best practices for the actual performance of war. We've created social norms to systematize all sorts of biological functions...

Agreed. War can be political, but nature of war is not.

You need to read your Azar Gat more closely! (It is, by the by, the best actually scholarly argument for the evolved-for-war position, as opposed to the rubbish 'evolutionary psychologist' peddling one finds online).

Gat spends quite a lot of time on the reasons which impel humans to war and what he comes up with are essentially political concerns: access to land, resources, mates and security. Classic grand-strategy statecraft stuff. Even in very early societies.

It's easy to see it all as feuds and vendettas, but 1) it isn't, and 2) even the feuds and vendettas are actually strategic and policy oriented, aimed at establishing and maintaining credibility in an environment where a reputation for fierceness is the only form of deterrence.

Weird, I interpreted him as saying the causes are NOT political. A guy killing another guy over a woman is not, on my understanding, a political act. People are impelled to violence by evolved psychological motives. Gat’s take is that the ultimate causes of war are these, no?

But then he gets into the 'web of desire' and we see rank, status, prestige, honour, retaliation to eliminate and deter and he's well into the sets of motivations we would understand as politics.

That said, I'd also say that, in reading the Clausewitz that started this, there is a risk of reading "the political object" too narrowly or understanding it in too modern a sense of 'politics.' The political object is merely the calculated end-goal of the conflict.