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:
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)