Limits
Political scientist Richard K. Betts has detailed some of the critiques regarding the feasibility and practicability of strategy, explaining "o skeptics, effective strategy is often an illusion because what happens in the gap between policy objectives and war outcomes it too complex and unpredictable to be manipulated to a specified end." Beyond the difficulty of organizing resources for effective grand strategy, Betts explores both the retrospective fallacy of coherence - the tendency to see the actions of states as more coherent and purposeful than they actually were or to assume particular actions and choices as more decisive in the outcome of events than they actually were - and the prospective fallacy of control - the tendency of policymakers to believe they can exert far greater influence over events than they can.
Read more about this topic: Grand Strategy
Famous quotes containing the word limits:
“The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I shall have the veil withdrawn and be allowed to gaze unblinded on the narrow limits of my own possibilities.”
—Beatrice Potter Webb (1858–1943)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)