“There have been instances lately of pilots literally flying their airplanes into the ground – the technical term is ‘controlled flight into terrain’ – because they concentrated too narrowly on some particular cockpit task while losing sight of their general responsibility to keep the machine in the air until the runway was safely under it. Statecraft, rather like aircraft, requires that those in charge think about a lot of things simultaneously.”

 — John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War historian, writing in 2001