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QUANTIFYING GREEN LANTERN THEORY. Having apparently taken Green Lantern Theory to heart, the Pentagon is attempting to develop a series of presumably quantitative measures for "political will":
A capability to dynamically assess the impact of political will on national/military objectives would be of enormous value to USG planners in that it would allow for more efficient/effective allocation of USG resources/efforts. This research project will de-construct and unpack the concept of political will into its constituent elements. The reduction of political will to a binary variable misses the tremendous array of intermediary positions between the poles of presence or absence. The project will establish a full spectrum of gradients between the two extremes based on the level of intensity of political will. This will enable policy-makers and field leaders to gauge just how much political will their counterparts possess...Sure. "Will" is notoriously difficult to pin down in international politics because leaders have an incentive to deceive; it's rarely beneficial to give an accurate depiction of "will" to either a friend or a foe. What's sometimes missed, though, is that leaders themselves rarely have a solid idea of how much "will" they can draw upon; President Bush, for example, apparently misunderstood the "will" of the American people to engage in a project to remake the Middle East, not to mention such things as destroy Social Security, etc. If someone could figure out a way to quantify "will", then I suppose it would be quite a significant achievement in both policy and academic terms. But... the problem with "political will" is that it doesn't really exist. It's an abstraction of a host of different elements that allow or disallow the pursuit of particular policy options. As a concept, it has no meaning apart from the specific policy goal in question. Even then, I suspect that there is no meaningful way to nail it down as a variable separate from policy advocacy itself. This makes me deeply, deeply skeptical of any effort to figure out a value for "will" such that it can be applied to any policy model. What these people want to do is to say that France, for example, has or lacks the "will" to engage in policy X. But that question makes no sense without specifying what policy X is, and the value will be different for policy Y. Even in that extremely narrow formulation, the value is in constant flux; why, for example, was France willing to sacrifice 1.3 milliion young men (more than have died in all the wars that the United States has fought since the American Revolution, including both sides of the Civil War) in its defense between 1914 and 1918, yet unwilling to continue the fight in 1940? I don't think that "will" provides a meaningful component to that question, and even if it did, how would a model account for the collapse of French "will" between the wars while Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, presumably, reacted in the opposite way? What we have here is a bunch of people obsessed with the idea that "will" is key to international politics; in short, people who believe that we can have anything is possible if we just want it enough. The problem is that it just doesn't work. "Will" is a meaningless abstraction more suitable to dramatic presentation than to an analytical model. Sadly, a fair number of people in power don't seem to understand the difference.
--Robert Farley
