QUANTIFICATION.

QUANTIFICATION. Yglesias made a critical point last week:

Anyone who follows the contemporary American military will tell you that it's frustratingly difficult to say how successful it is at minimizing civilian casualties since, after all, the military doesn't count civilian casualties. But there you have it. If Bush really wanted to minimize civilian casualties, wouldn't he order the Pentagon to keep track of civilian casualties? That way you could see how effective the casualty-minimizing tactics employed in this situation or that were. You could, by comparing different efforts, be constantly improving our methods of casualty-minimization. Any serious effort to minimize (or maximize) anything requires an effort to quantify the minimized or maximized quantity. But Bush doesn't do that (and he's not unique among world leaders or US presidents in this regard) because he's not, at the end of the day, trying very seriously to minimize civilian casualties. He's trying to minimize his perceived responsibility for civilian deaths. Part of this is taking steps thought likely to reduce civilian casualties. Another part is to prevent quantification of civilian casualties.

Right. Stephen Rosen wrote a great book (Winning the Next War) describing how effective military innovation is dependent on the production of reliable, relevant quantitative data. How did the Western Alliance know it was winning the U-boat war? Because it could compare the number of freighters sunk with the number produced in American shipyards, and find that the latter was much larger than the former. Similarly, the Allied strategic bombing offensive suffered from an inability to quantify the damage done to Germany, leading to attacks on irrelevant targets and measures (like square miles of city incinerated) that were impressive in and of themselves but had virtually no impact on the outcome of the war. Without a reliable measure of progress, there's almost no way to tell whether a particularly tactic or weapon is working.To be sure, badly designed quantitative measures can prove disastrous. Curtis Lemay's obsession with showing progress led him to incinerate civilian neighborhoods of Japanese cities, and the reliance of the U.S. Army on body counts in Vietnam both missed the point of counter-insurgency and created perverse incentives for U.S. officers. Neither of those situations are comparable with Iraq, however. Preventing civilian death is an end unto itself, and counting the number of civilian dead is a uniquely effective method of calculating progress toward that end. As Matt points out, the absence of an effort to produce reliable numbers indicates that the military has no way of knowing how many civilians have died, and more importantly has no way of assessing methods designed to kill fewer civilians. That the military has abandoned the body count metric of Vietnam is laudable. That it now refuses to do any count whatsoever isn't, because by preventing the assessment of reasonable measures to minimize casualties, it will invariably increase the civilian death toll.

--Robert Farley