The challenge for Washington is no longer whether it possesses sufficient capabilities, but whether the political system can align those capabilities behind a coherent long-term priority.
So, to succeed in the trough of graft, a politician must have a profusion of scandals, so many of them all at once such that they would eventually overwhelm the system’s capacity to cope.
[W]hen ethics are abandoned for epics, and when political power subverts rational military decision-making, it is not surprising that symptoms of strategic fatigue begin to develop.