One of our most important tasks is to get the media focused on honest, intelligent measurements of the course of any insurgency.

This isn't easy, but there are several things that can be done.

The first is to understand that reporters and editors in general lack the interest or the training to understand which metrics are important and which aren't. They have a jackdaw mentality towards metrics and the shinier the metric the better. They also concentrate on the metrics that their sources seem to think are important.

A classic example of this was the media's use of steel prices as an overall indicator of economic health and future inflation from the 40s through the 70s. In the 40s many economists believed that the price of steel was a predictor of growth and inflation in the coming months. It was a nice, easy number so the media latched onto it.

By the 60s most economists had abandoned steel prices by themselves as a reliable indicator. The economy was more complex, steel was being replaced by aluminum in many products, more of the steel in products was being imported, etc.

But the change utterly missed the media and steel price increases were a feature of the nightly news at least through the 70s.

Some indicators are inherently misleading, but they're so important we can never replace them. US casualties is the classic example. As the original article pointed out, casualty figures are a terrible way to measure the progress of a war, but they are so viscerally tied they will always be important.

Focus on casualties isn't a new phenomenon. In the Civil War, the first 'newspaper war' in American history, Americans were so appalled at the huge casualty numbers being run up that they came close to dumping Lincoln and replacing him with the Democratic 'peace now' candidate -- George McClellan. This was in spite of the fact that it was obvious to any rational observer that the Union was on the verge of completely defeating the South.

The third problem, of course, is that there are some people who want to use inappropriate metrics because they foster their political goals. The House Democrats were an excellent example this week. You can also expect these people to be highly critical of metrics which don't support their position and to spin them hard -- again, witness the use of the casualty figures by the hard core anti-war types.

So, given all this, how do we get the media to accept and report better metrics?

In the first place, the metrics have to be really, provably, better. This won't work as a PR exercise.

Second, we have to start using the. By 'we', I mean the military and the government sources as well as the non-government sources. We have to use them at every opportunity and be willing to provide a brief explanation of why they are better at the drop of a hat.

Third, we have to demonstrate why the new metrics are better than the old ones. We have to show, in great detail and with great clarity, why the "price of steel" is either not relevant or too easy to manipulate.

This is going to take a major educational effort aimed at the media and the public. The media in particular don't like to change their world view -- or the often-inappropriate metrics which underly it.

Fourth, we have to accept that some metrics, like casualty figures will never go away. Casualty numbers are particularly difficult because denigrating them can be interpreted as denigrating the importance of dead and wounded Americans.

We can point out that casualty numbers don't provide a measure of who's winning and we can illustrate this with the casualty figures from the Pacific theater in WWII and the Civil War, where casualties peaked just before victory. But we have to be careful in doing so.

Likewise we can point out that the numbers of Iraqi dead may have been influenced by the fact that more of the victims are being reported as the security system improves.

Fifth, we have to accept that in a democracy, metrics will always measure progress in a war. Since we can't use lines on a map, we need easy to grasp metrics which can support it.

Sixth, we can't lie. If our shiny new metrics show that the war is going against us, we have to be honest about that as well.