One key to strategy: Hone your planning by considering what might lead to failure

One
line that I've always hated is "Failure is not
an option."

Rather,
failure should always be considered carefully in strategic discussions. One
question that needs to be asked is, "How could we lose this thing?" That helps
sharpen the discussion and helps lead to distinctions between what is essential
and what is merely important, as Eisenhower put it early in World War II.

I
mention all this because Paul Kennedy mentions in The Rise and Fall of
British Naval Mastery
that early in the 7 Years' War (a.k.a. the French and Indian
War), the British recognized early on that the only way they could totally lose
was through a French invasion of England. So job one was to prevent that.