Some Discontents of American Strategists: Views from a Marginal Man

摘要

American strategists disagree among themselves for the usual reasons people disagree: They know different facts, have different interpretations of facts, define problems differently, disagree about criteria, and hold different ideologies which color their analyses and prescriptions. Strategy, being a 'soft science' with its civilian practitioners and an 'art' with its military professionals, lacks those good starting points that the true sciences have- laws, theories, and axioms about which strategists can agree. Even economists with divergent social values agree on the law of diminishing returns to scale. But when strategists debate-when they reveal, too often by implication only, their enduring discontents-it is especially tough for their audience to know where they are going, not knowing where they started.