Revising FM 3-24: What needs to change?

[Cavguy]

What Ken said, and nice marketing pitch by the way.

Available in training for you via IMPAC for $2500/session! (no kidding)

I believe we discussed the merits of balanced scorecardhere.

[John T. Fishel]

I have discussed the SWORD Model to some extent here and, at Marc T's suggestion, am working on a summary article (with a new twist or 2). Since it will take me a bit to finish, I want to make a couple of comments here that relate to Mark's post.

The SWORD Model is Social Science. It makes use of the scientific method for theory development, data collection, and data analysis. When you see the article, you will recognize its dimensions from 3-24, 100-20, JP 3-07 and lots of other places. Until the research was done, however, no quantitative metrics existed. Moreover, the model works quite well with qualitative data and analysis but only - as Mark says - as principles. Metrics in an ongoing conflict are notoriously difficult to gather and, especially difficult to cull from public sources. In the last chapter of Max and my Uncomfortable Wars Revisited I applied the model to the ongoing conflict in Iraq using only public data (this was as of 2004). I hedged and qualified all over the place but a rigorous read shows that I was overly optimistic at the time and dead wrong on unity of effort.

So, using any Social Science model depends on the quality of the model, the quality of the data (mine was not nearly as good as it should have been), and the art of the interpreter (mine was pretty good since it was almost sufficiently hedged).

On that cautionary note

Cheers

JohnT