war metrics

8/12/2019 War Metrics

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ARE WE WINNING YET? LED ASTRAY BY

METRICS

Mark Stout

October 2, 2013 in Commentary and Analysis

How do you know if youre winning a war? It turns out it is much more complicated than youd

expect.

I recently returned from the Naval Postgraduate School in California where I met with other scholars

to put together a book on assessing war the efforts that militaries or other fighting forces make to

determine whether they are winning or losing a war. I left California seeing the problem in quite a

different way from what Id expected or from what the organizers had intended.

Early discussions about a theoretical framework suggested a common way of assessing our

historical case studies: identify the political goals that were to be obtained by the war, then identify

the benchmarks that the military in question used to measure its progress toward that goal. Then we

were to look at the information that the military collected to determine if those benchmarks had been

reached. Finally, we were to consider the incentives that the desire to collect this information

created for the military. Often those incentives were perverse, as in the case of the body counts in

Vietnam.

Each author gave a brief summary of his or her topic and as I listened to historians talk about

assessment within most American wars from the civil war through today, it struck me that the

historians were describing very quantitative data-heavy methods of assessment for the wars since

Vietnam.

We are past the time when progress could be measured by looking at the movement of a front line

on a map. However, at some point the United States militarylike the rest of the countryfell inlove with data. Lots of data. Data in the form of numbers: munitions expended, body counts,

percentage of the country with electricity, poll numbers, number of dollars spent on development

projects, etc. The U.S. military loves the word metrics. Metrics, of course, allow us to measure

things and we believe that anything can be measured. So now the military gathers a whole slew of

data that it can use to measure things so we can understand what is going on. The problem is, we

still dont understand what is going on. One of the organizers of the conference mentioned that in
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probably tempted to say that it is. Yet, that is us looking through our 21 st century cultural blinders.

Clausewitz would scoff at us.

With 47 terabytes of data, any drone can produce a convincing case for pretty much anything. A

wise commander would prefer the judgment of genuine experts with insight even if they cant

enunciate why they know what they think they know, even if they cant show their work.

Mark Stout is a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks. He is the Director of the MA Program in Global

Security Studies at Johns Hopkins Universitys School of Arts and Sciences in Washington, DC.
http://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/global-security-studies/http://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/global-security-studies/http://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/global-security-studies/http://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/global-security-studies/http://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/global-security-studies/

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