Wars cannot be fought the same way bureaucrats haggle over apportionments. The toll of human life in battle does not lend itself to cost/benefit analysis. One’s plan of action on the international chessboard cannot be built on compromise businesslike decisions among factions. To design a country’s strategy along a middle course for bureaucratic reasons is to aim at what Winston Churchill has called the bull’s eye of disaster.
—James Stockdale, CAG-16, A Vietnam Experience