There is nothing more practical than good theory. Contrary to the uninformed conventional wisdom, good theory is necessarily antecedent to good practice. Without good theory, for example, in medicine, in engineering, in architecture, there would be no purposeful healing, no operational aircraft, no stable or cost-efficient buildings. Strategic studies are no exception. They, too, require antecedent investigations based upon creative conceptualization, plausible hypotheses, and a combining of both inductive and deductive modes of inference.
Science is a method of reaching conclusions.
Science involves more than the allocation of numerical values to different properties and more than assessments of war that arbitrarily allocate different levels of probability. Moreover, these investigations were not part of a concerted and coherent development of strategic theory. These same drawbacks are typically characteristic of investigations presently being conducted at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan. Israel's survival cannot rest upon poor scholarship. Good scholars are needed NOW to examine competing policy claims with reason and method.