August 28, 2005

Metrics

So, David Brooks finally rolled out of the cave, took a stretch, and looked around. And saw, according to his Aug. 28 column in the Times, which regards the Pentagon's approach to Iraq, that "The answers have been disturbing. There is no clear strategy. There are no clear metrics."

First of all: welcome to the party, Dave. Nice of you to show. Even nicer of you to have finally doffed the rose-colored sleeping shades and opened those puffy nearsighted eyes. And please do let us know if you trip over any further brilliant observations.

Meanwhile, a more general question: why is it that the most vociferous advocates of market philosophies are the very first ones to jettison them when it becomes momentarily convenient to do so? I'm thinking, for example, of those champions of competition who, after a few years of comfy success, devote the main of their energies toward the elimination, often by foul means, of any potential competition — rather than, say, on improving their product or service, which is what competition, by their own textbooks, is supposed to engender.

Or, for another example, of a Pentagon supposedly staffed by corporate wonks and run on the philosophies of efficiency and managerial oversight so supposedly central to the free market way of life. And as we consider such an example, let's note that Brooks raises an interesting subject: metrics. In the enlightened corporate community of the last eight years, metrics has been one of the busiest watchwords. Many an expensive corporate retreat has been devoted to spreading their gospel — to naming them, tracking them, charting and graphing them, draping them across the pages of equally expensive annual reports. Promotions have been earned by them, as well as pink slips. I knew of an entire company in San Francisco — and this was pre-dot-com — devoted solely to the identification and grooming of them, in any context. They've been seen for quite some time as a kind of magic key for understanding what, exactly, is going on with whatever it is your company is up to.

And so you'd think that when a group of devotees of corporate philosophy moved into the Pentagon and began remodelling it according to corporate philosophy's tenets, the first thing on the list would be metrics. First you define a goal; then you define the metrics by which you will measure progress toward that goal (and by the way — and this is telling — corporate metrics philosophy holds that if you can't put your finger on a set of metrics by which you can measure your progress, your goal is probably not worth pursuing as such). Nowhere would this seem more applicable than the military, and nowhere in the military would it seem more applicable — or more necessary — than in the planning for and conduct of a war. Having a clearly defined objective is supposed to be the central tenet of all modern military operations, is it not? Bringing a corporate approach which presumably values efficiency should only have reinforced this.

And yet, as Brooks belatedly notes, it has not been so. Curiously, the lack of metrics and strategy he cites fit with a range of other behaviors which are equally surprising in light of the presumptive focus on efficiency this Pentagon has espoused.

Take the dramatic increase in outsourcing. Private companies haven't been contracted for so great a portion of a war effort in over a hundred years; the Pentagon has outsourced tasks from transportation to engineering to mechanics to security — which is to say nearly everything they possibly could. Their argument for the wisdom of this rests firmly on the grounds of efficiency. Yet repeated attempts to check their progress — to see that in fact greater efficiencies are being achieved — yield not contradictory data, but no data at all. The Pentagon can't tell you how much it's spending on private security companies, for example: it doesn't know. (See Daniel Bergner's "The Other Army" in the August 14 NY Times Magazine.)

This is stunning. Rumsfeld wants to dramatically redefine how this nation goes to war; the changes he's proposed — and that he is in fact making, at this very moment — are profound in their ethical and philosophical as well as practical implications. And yet he's making no attempt to measure their success. Efficiency — bang for buck — is one of the few goals that his team has identified, one of the core justifications for radical policies like outsourcing of military duties; yet they can't even tell you what their outlay is. How will they know they've been more efficient — by some kind of tingling sensation in their backsides? How would that go over in your average enlightened corporate board meeting?

CHAIR: "How'd we do this year, Bob?"

CEO: "Well, Tom, I think we did great."

CHAIR: "You think?"

CEO: "Tom, I really do."

CHAIR: "Well, did our revenues increase?"

CEO: "Couldn't tell ya, Tom. We didn't count 'em."

CHAIR: "Wow, Bob. Well, then, did our costs decrease?"

CEO: "No idea, Tom. Didn't count those either."

CHAIR: "So what makes you think we did well?"

CEO: "Oh, I don't know. Doesn't it seem like we ought to've? I mean, we're such a great bunch of guys ..."

Though consultants get paid handsomely to lecture on the subject, metrics, as a concept, isn't terribly difficult. The crucial part is knowing what you want. Without that, it's impossible to know when, or whether, you've got it.

As usual, Brooks is right, up to a point. Strategy is a good thing. Metrics are a good thing. They keep almost any endeavor from devolving into aimlessness and eternal futility. Where he goes wrong is in believing that their application in Iraq will do anything but prolong the slow, steady, tragic bleed. The example he cites — the British in Malaysia fighting the ethnic Chinese communist insurgency — is less a support for his argument than it is a capsule refutation. The British project in Malaysia was thoroughly colonial, and thoroughly self-serving (which the US claims its enterprise in Iraq is not); and while it did have some military and even a smattering of political success, it was, in the end, a failure. It could not and did not last. The Brits were forced out of Malaysia in the late '50s, by movements representing the spectrum from nationalism to communism to Islam; the country they left behind was officially Islamic, subject in many respects to sharia, and riven by racial tensions. It lives today under virtual one-party rule and the diminished civil liberties inflicted by an "emergency rule" imposed during the race riots of 1969 and never lifted. And anti-Western sentiment, a legacy of the Portuguese and British eras, remains a strong undercurrent.

(Come to think of it, Brooks may have chosen a more apt example than he intended.)

The invasion of Iraq was doomed to failure even before it began. It was doomed, yes, by lack of planning, lack of intelligence, lack of strategy, and even — give Brooks credit — lack of metrics. But more fundamentally it was doomed by a misreading of human history, and worse still of human nature. The Bush administration wanted a pliant, secular, oil-rich state in a strategically central location in the Arab middle East. They never put it that way, of course, at least not for public consumption. They talked instead about WMD, and then about terrorism and 9/11, and then about that amorphous perennial, "freedom." Each of these was halfhearted. Each was also, in the end, demonstrably false. It hardly matters. An invasion was never going to get them what they wanted, and it never will.

One might ask Brooks, not to mention Rumsfeld et al., about a different kind of metrics: the metrics of failure. How many bodies does it take, for example — American, Iraqi, or otherwise — to make a tragic mistake? How many freshly minted anti-Western militants does it take to make a national security threat?

Now that Brooks is awake, maybe he can keep count.

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