Number Our Daze
On one level, I can sympathize with, and even geek out over, the task of military casualty analysts in Baghdad, as profiled by Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post. But analysts and managers are always at risk of becoming prisoners of their categories, and the more different ways you have of measuring performance, the greater the temptation to highlight the best-looking indices that rise up from the crowd. This is as much a temptation in the private sector as in the government, including the military. In the private sector, though, the piper eventually gets paid. You have a bad quarter; you have to restate earnings; you go broke.
Nobody has to be affirmatively dishonest to grab some good-looking trends and toss them around without adequate caveats. (In the case of casualty figures, the most obvious one is, “Am I comparing the immature part of my data set to the mature part naively?“) They just need to be eager for “signs of progress” and stop looking when and only when they find it. Time plays a role too. As deadlines impinge, you tend to get less strict about rigor – you’re tired and you want to put this schedule to bed, for crying out loud.
One thing I wish DeYoung discussed is how uniform the military’s casualty attribution method has been over time. For instance, was the famous “front of the head/back of the head” rule in place in 2006? 2005? An even bigger concern is the essential naiveté that seems to be at work. I think the line between “crime” and “ethno-sectarian violence” in a war zone is a lot blurrier than the MNF-I’s analysts profess. I think the distinction in methods is much blurrier. There are times crooks make examples of victims with torture and mutilation; there must be times that ethno-sectarian killers just don’t have time to do the binding and transporting and outraging they prefer.
