Thanks for the link. I wasn’t aware that this was official US government policy.
Reminds me of the Vietnam war (or American war as it was referred to by the locals) where the US couldn’t say they were winning based on the amount of territory they held (because they couldn’t actually capture and hold much territory for very long). Instead, the “quantitative measurements” of McNamara’s computer systems could only show that they were “winning” the war based on the number of enemy combatants killed – with the result that any Vietnamese killed by US forces were retroactively recorded as Vietcong. Most of us are familiar with Goodhart's law regarding measures becoming targets so I’d be curious to know how much it applied to the Vietnam war.
Reminds me of the Vietnam war (or American war as it was referred to by the locals) where the US couldn’t say they were winning based on the amount of territory they held (because they couldn’t actually capture and hold much territory for very long). Instead, the “quantitative measurements” of McNamara’s computer systems could only show that they were “winning” the war based on the number of enemy combatants killed – with the result that any Vietnamese killed by US forces were retroactively recorded as Vietcong. Most of us are familiar with Goodhart's law regarding measures becoming targets so I’d be curious to know how much it applied to the Vietnam war.