Do Metrics Matter?

[Steve Blair]

Metrics can be useful, but the issue I keep seeing in many areas is that they often become an end in themselves. And that's when they become dangerous. In law enforcement you see crime reporting twisted to keep certain "hot" categories low, in academia you see actual student learning subordinated to metrics based on five year completion rates and situations where resources are focused on the top 5% of students and the bottom 5%, leaving the average student in the morass of being "average" and thus not requiring resources.

A metric is a tool. Nothing more. Elevating it to a goal is dangerous, especially when you're using the wrong metric or trying to quantify something that can't easily be quantified (or shouldn't be quantified).

[davidbfpo]

I have long argued - in the UK policing context - that 'Key Performance Indicators' were twisted into 'Measures' or metrics. A very different function.

Rudy Giuliani in his book on NYC writes well on the need for having metrics to assess performance, IIRC he called them performance measures.

[carl]

Good leaders will make good use of metrics, good, bad or indifferent. If the right ones aren't there, they will figure the situation out. The quality of the leaders is the key.

I think our fixation with the right metrics, the wrong metrics, being interpreted this way or that way is in keeping with what appears to me to be a cultural proclivity to eliminate the human element in war and especially in combat leadership. It seems that we are always looking for some machine or process that will make good leadership moot. If we could only find the right thing, then the hard and uncertain task of finding and promoting good leaders, there would be no need for.

Bill M: Gregory Daddis also wrote a book about that subject.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Sure-Victor.../dp/0199746877

I thought it a good book.

[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.