Do Metrics Matter?

[TheCurmudgeon]

Metrics are just numbers. It is a question of what you believe the number represent. If you believe that the complexities of human motivations and feelings can be easily and simply reduced to a metric then you will find your answer in metrics, even if you have to create the data points and the conclusions to draw from them. If you are willing to assume that humans are more complicated than that, then you can still find indicators, but they will not yield absolute proof of success or failure, only the potential for movement in a specific direction.

Even then, you must have a complete understanding of what it is you are trying to achieve. I don't think most military types have any idea the political and cultural impetus behind our ultimate objectives. We happily delude ourselves into believing we understand how other people think. I wish I had a better answer. All I can do is advise against the blind belief that everything can be reduced to simple metrics.

[Bill Moore]

I'll revisit my principle concern with metrics during conflict and war. When it is our principle objective to defeat an adversary, any metric not tied to the adversary's will or capability to continue to fight will not tell us if we're winning. This is true even for COIN, and it applies to addressing to political issues that will take the wind out of the adversary's will to fight, but more often the type of political compromise required to do that is not acceptable to us.

What do we do instead, instead we frame the underlying issues of the conflict as economic, the need for democracy, etc. and aggressively pursue activities related to economic development and establishing democratic governance (the bulk of our indirect metrics) that even if successful have nothing to do with the reason our adversaries are fighting us in most cases (though this approach could probably work in the Philippines, since the communist insurgency is largely driven my poor governance and economic disparity). The second set of metrics we focus are tied to MOP or input which is the number of security forces trained, though as we all though if they don't have the will to fight these metrics mean little. This one will perturb the COINdistas, but it needs to be stated. Our attempt to separate the populace from the insurgents in Afghanistan will not defeat what we're calling an insurgency, and is another irrelevant metric for a lot of reasons that converge together, but the only one I'll mention here is we're not denying the ability of the insurgent to continue to operate when they enjoy safe havens across the border with Pakistan. They can continue to fight regardless of how many villages we "control," because they enjoy a safehaven and we're expending limited resources to hold the status quo. If you use temporal analysis the VSO program will look good short term, but over time if the populace doesn't actively and willingly support the Gov of Afghanistan without our artificial life support what have we accomplished? I think our adversaries know this, and if they're using their metrics to assess their strategy they probably assess they're effectively targeting our will to continue fighting. We don't measure that, we measure what is usually irrelevant.

[slapout9]

Bill,
Part of the problem IMO is our obsession with Political Correctness. I said a while back that the new flash points will be Race, Religion and Language. Since we live in a country where it is strictly forbidden to discuss subjects like this because we are all the same and we are all equal.......We are sitting ducks. IMO MOST other people in the world don't believe in anything like that and they never will!

So there metrics are rather simple.... how many American Infidels can you kill and how much or their property can you steal or destroy. We are sitting ducks, we are loosing because of our belief in some left over Marxists-Communist-Muslim Liberation theology. I bet AQ is getting stronger and laughing at us......but of course our leadership will deny this is happening because we are all living on the Love boat.

[carl]

Slap:

You are right. Remember when Bush used to say something like 'They hate us for what we are.' and he would follow that up with things like being free and prosperous, things like that? We have to start seeing that the takfiri killers don't hate us because we have refrigerators and free speech, they hate us because we aren't Muslim. We can't win until we say that. It is hard to beat the enemy unless you are clear about what he is.

[Bill Moore]

Carl and Slap,

Political Correctness is an illness in our society that needs to be aggressively eradicated to ensure our people remain free to think independently and state their opinions without being condemned by a leftist movement that leads an assault on anyone that disagrees with their views. That said, I don't think that is the root of our challenges.

Despite PC, America still has an attractive moral power that many, maybe even most, people around the world respect to include the majority of Muslims. We can forfeit that critical advantage if we act in a way that is perceived as a war on Islam instead of a war on extremists. The terrorists will not be deterred by economic development and democracy, in fact democracy actually inflames the situation for many fundamentalist Muslims who are not terrorists.

When we occupy Muslim lands and attempt to transform we generate the propaganda the extremists need to recruit those who find their narrative of interest. I really think, but of course can never know, it would have been a very different situation if we conducted a punitive expedition in Afghanistan and then left. We would have been respected my many Muslims for defending our honor while respecting their land. Even Clinton's weak cruise missile attack on Sudan resulted in Al-Qaeda being shown the door. Instead we fell for Al-Qaeda's publically stated objective of dragging us into a quagmire where they could attack our will to sustain the effort, and bleed out our economic power. I don't think they anticipated staying this long, but they're still achieving their stated ends, and they did so my targeting our will to fight instead of compete for who has influence over the population.

Al-Qaeda should have been defeated a long time ago, and I'm currently under the belief our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have played in their favor over time despite the core of Al-Qaeda being largely eliminated. Winning over the population and the metrics associated with doing so is not a substitute for strategy.

[carl]

Bill M:

A few days ago one of the Denver radio stations broadcast an alert to the listeners about some criminals who were engaged in some very violent activity, apparently hi-jacking cars in the mid-day. Denver PD had tweeted a description and an appeal for help in finding these guys before somebody got hurt. The description the station broadcast was 6 males in an old brown or tan Toyota. 6 males. Not six white males, black males, hispanic males, but just 6 males. I don't know if "6 males" was what the Denver PD tweeted or if that is what the radio station decided to broadcast but it was done because they were afraid that if they added a race somebody somewhere might have taken offense. In so doing they possibly delayed the sighting and apprehension of the "6 males" because the description given was basically no description at all. That could have gotten people hurt or killed, innocent people. And all because somebody could have taken offense if the apparent race of the suspects was stated.

Now would the radio station or the Denver PD been wrong if they had given the race in the description? No, they would not have been. They would have been acting reasonably and in good faith while attempting to protect innocents from criminals. If anybody had taken offense at an apparent race being added to the description they would have been wrong and the effect of their illegitimate hypersensitivity may have been to get some people hurt who didn't deserve it.

The people we are fighting in this aren't just extremists. They aren't the Red Army Faction nor Aum Shinrikyo nor the practice squad of the Miami Dolphins. They are religious extremists. And they are a particular sub-group of that religion. They are Sunni, wahabi/deobandi and takfiri. They aren't Sufi dervishes. We should make it clear, especially to ourselves, who it is that we must fight because they are trying to kill us. If that makes some Muslims with mouthpieces mad somewhere that's too damn bad. They are wrong for feeling that way. We aren't wrong for stating what is.

The Muslims who would take offense at our stating clearly who it is we are fighting because they are trying to kill us are predisposed to be hostile to us anyway. I have great confidence that a Malaysian shopkeeper will know that when we say we are fighting takfiri killers we don't mean him. Some Saudi Wahabi sub-prince who gets irate at that I don't care about since he probably leaning the wrong way anyway. You can't please everybody.

On our part this will take work and it will take character. It will be work to explain to people the difference between a takfiri killer and a Sufi dervish. And it will take character to withstand the PC attacks that will be launched when that is done. The big problem is the genii inside the beltway may not have the character and, despite their fancy educations, I don't think have the smarts to tell the difference between a takfiri killer and a Ahmadi.

We can't beat the religious interpretation that results in AQ and their ilk. The Muslims have to do that. What we can do is be forthright about the situation and keep killing the attackers until they stop coming for us. Sort of like Jeremiah Johnson just kept killing the braves who came for him until the Crows gave it up. (I stole that from another thread.)

I hear that argument about just doing a punitive expedition in response to 9-11 on occasion. In my view that is sort of simplistic nostalgia. 'Oh if only we had just kicked ass, taken names and gone home none of this would have happened.' We asked MO and the boys to turn over AQ. They wouldn't. If we had done a punitive strike they would have all gone to Pakistan to hide under the skirts of the Pak Army/ISI, which is what they did anyway, to come back when we left. Which is what they will try to do anyway, only they would have been there that much sooner and that much more certainly.

[Steve Blair]

First off, I tend to be of the opinion that you can't negotiate with a terrorist group once it's taken that final step. Most terrorist groups, if they last past their initial stages, evolve (or devolve, depending on how you look at it) into rather amorphous entities motivated by the cycle of violence and revenge more than any measurable (or attainable) goals. They may pay lip service to goals, but they are generally so fuzzy and indistinct that they're window dressing by that point. And once a group crosses the line into terrorism of that type, you can only eliminate them.

Punitive expeditions can work, provided you have a good understanding of the actual centers of gravity of your targets. Most of the actions in the Indian Wars could actually be classed as punitive expeditions, and they were successful (or not) based on the understanding particular commanders had of their opponents. Mackenzie's efforts during the Red River War (culminating with the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon) were successful because he understood that the key to breaking the power of the Comanche and Kiowa on the Plains could be found in their logistical systems (actual camp supplies and horse herds). If you took out those systems while minimizing actual casualties (he also seemed to understand the revenge requirement in most Plains cultures that could drive them into conflict) you could force the tribes onto reservations. Custer, on the other hand, never seemed to understand that. Crook also failed in that regard, although he was successful against other tribal groups with different environmental considerations. We have a mixed history with these kind of expeditions (Pershing's foray into Mexico is just one example), and I think it's mostly because we don't develop commanders who understand the situation they're going into and fail to adapt. We have perhaps been most successful when military force is used as an adjunct to State Department goals (the so-called Banana Wars), although even then our longer-term legacy is very uneven.

Metrics in my view are a convenient crutch for this lack of understanding. It's easier to construct a fancy Excel spreadsheet than it is to identify points of vulnerability in an organization that doesn't look like a fielded army. We saw this during the development of air target lists during the Vietnam War. Air Force planners looked at maps of North Vietnam and for some reason saw WW2 Germany and listed their targets as if NVN was a fully industrialized society with the same needs and dependencies as a European opponent. So the war became all about sorties flown and tons dropped and less about the actual value of the targets.

What we have likely done with AQ is a larger-scale version of what happened with the IRA and the PLO. We've caused it to multiply and divide, with smaller pieces motivated more by revenge and general bloodlust than actual measurable goals and objectives. Those pieces, IMO, can only be killed or otherwise neutralized, and even then it's a very long haul (David can speak better than I regarding the issues in NI, but even there it continues to rumble on at a very low simmer...peace talks and settlements aside).