The armament described is not archaic. Shield, spear and sword proportions, the depth and articulation of the formation, the use of skirmishers ahead of a heavy line, and the rotation of units all resemble Hellenistic and Roman practice. Yigael Yadin, whose 1962 study remains the standard treatment, argued from the equipment for a date in the Roman period, roughly the second half of the first century BCE, and Geza Vermes concurred. Others, including Russell Gmirkin, read the same details as Seleucid and date the material to the second century BCE. The Cave 4 recensions complicate matters further by suggesting the text grew over time, which makes a single date for the whole less likely than a single date for one column.
What the scroll is not is a plan. Nothing about it is operational. No enemy disposition is assessed, no terrain considered, no contingency admitted that is not already scripted; the enemy is a theological category, the sequence of victory and defeat is fixed in advance, and the decisive stroke is God's. A general given this document could not use it.
It is better read as liturgy and as ideology: a rehearsal of the end, in which the community's separation, its purity rules, its priestly hierarchy and its division of humanity into two camps are projected onto a final battlefield and vindicated there. That reading is not a way of softening the text. The scroll expects a real war with real corpses, and it means the extermination of the Sons of Darkness literally. It simply does not tell anyone how to fight one, and pretending otherwise misreads what its authors were doing when they wrote out the words to be engraved on a trumpet.