Since people have been talking a bit about the possibility of reconciling what players with a strong combat-as-war preference like and what players with a strong combat-as-sport preference like but not coming to too many conclusions, here's a thought. Maybe all of the out-of-combat, resource-tracking, strategic-planning stuff that combat-as-war players like, instead of setting the difficulty of the combat you get into, sets the stakes? If you plan and manage resources well, maybe you successfully raise a rebel army against the evil emperor, bust into his throne room and end up in a balanced fight against him and a handful of his elite guards while your allies hold off the rest of his forces outside. If you plan and manage resources badly, the rebellion collapses and the balanced fights you end up getting into are instead against the evil emperor's patrols as they try to hunt you down and capture you: your main goal at that point is just to get out of the emperor's lands alive, and you're going to have to really shine in those combats to ever get a shot at taking the emperor down.
My main problem with the combat-as-war paradigm is the fact that it can trivialise combat encounters that I'd have enjoyed being challenged by, so I think I'd be happy with a game that did something like this, but I'd like to hear what players with a combat-as-war preference think.
As more of a CaWers normally, I've been drifting a bit towards this a bit in my 4e Wilderlands sandbox, I think. Letting good PC pre-battle strategy make an encounter easy often doesn't work well in 4e, whereas keeping encounter difficulty in the -1 to +4 EL range and letting PC pre-combat strategy determine the stakes, keeps it firmly in the 4e sweet spot. The only big downside is that it requires a lot of planning & encounter building session to session and does not allow a 'status quo sandbox' approach.