How about the truth is somewhere in between? Some people are scheming - and some schemes do come off successfully.
There has been nothing but scheming and counter-scheming since this U.S. election - the removal of General Flynn being, according to some commentators, just the latest example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_ZfKmcnSk
Schemes are occasionally successful, but that is because the schemer either got lucky and everyone reacted the way they wanted, or because the scheme was incredibly simple.
What the article is talking about is the mythical scheming that involves correctly predicting the behavior and reactions of the opposition through multiple iterations of attack and counter attack--the hypothetical chess master who can see 5 moves ahead.
The systems we are dealing with are generally just too complex for that.
I always (as a Vet) thought this was a misnomer - it's often best described as "no battle plan survives contact with reality" - reality being the new info you get that you didn't get or couldn't have gotten.
Indeed, it is only when you encounter an actual combat situation that you understand why the karate elders insist on so many thousand mindless repetitions of basic movements back & forth: even though you have no time to think (and even if you did it would do no good because combat stress reduces your intellectual capacity by 80%), it instantly executes spontaneously and afterwards you find yourself thinking "wow - I did that ?". Brutal repetitive training that focuses on the basics: it works.
Great schemes are simple. It means looking for opportunities where you cannot lose. More generally, either you win or your opponent loses or both. You can try to influence things to produce such situations, but in general you need some luck and/or time. You can actively search for opportunities of disruption or work on some hard stuff for decades.
Bert the turtle was very alert..