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.