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Original post can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/recommended-innovation-articles-and-commentary-10-killing-is-our-business-and-business-is-12690ea0243c

This week’s topic is on the perpetual military fixation on quantitative methods, systematic logic and our expectation that in complex, dynamic systems (basically every war), we seek linear-causal relationships such as “more dead bad guys leads to increased security and stability”- yet outside of immediate, local and temporary contexts (tactical). this never materializes. This article explores the military obsession with metrics, using the Vietnam War and then the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as continuations of this institutional desire to frame war in a particular logic. Written in 2017, it extends perfectly into the collapse of Kabul and may be of interest for how we approach the prospect of a future space war.

The article is titled “‘Killing is our business and business is good’: The evolution of ‘war managerialism’ from body counts to counterinsurgency” by Leo McCann (University of Manchester, UK) published through Organization, Vol. 24 (4), 2017, pp. 491–515. The article is located at the link below, and unfortunately there is a pay wall. Those of you with library or base research access should be able to get it easily- and for others, you may need to “phone a friend” or purchase the PDF:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350508417693852

I find this article quite useful when discussing with military organizations the challenging subject of assessments- such as the doctrinal terms “measures of performance” and “measures of effectiveness”. We do both of these entirely in a doctrinally convergent, Newtonian Style that seeks an analytical (versus synthetical) mode of logic; the ancient Greek “ideal” form is paired with the “real” or reality, and we configure our “ends-ways-means” with “problem-solution” logic mechanistically- systematically, in linear-causal logic. First, we have to dispel with the propaganda that “we don’t do body counts anymore.” For those with combat tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Africa, and elsewhere, this tends to get eyerolls and chuckles. Of course we still do this- we just renamed it. The deeper, underlying problem institutionally is that we continue to try to engineer our way through complex, dynamic systems where living, thinking humans are hardly the sort of beings that wittingly behave according to simplistic (single best-solution, closed) or even complicated (good-enough solution, managed) settings except perhaps in abstract patterns. Contextually, people are dynamic…even chaotic (and if “chaos” is considered a negative, that is likely due to one’s social paradigm that prefers an ordered reality “cosmos” to “chaos” or the emergent, unpredictable, uncertain real world).

Managerialism thus obscures killing work by framing it as an objective, value-free science, much like engineering, accounting or statistics (Funnell and Chwastiak, 2015; Lindqvist, 2012). The moral horrors of area bombing are thus written out, and the shift to the much more intense air assault on Japanese cities is widely credited as a success for McNamara and the Army Air Forces, in that it allowed objectives to be predicted, met and measured in the most efficient manner possible (Frank, 1999: 57–82). p. 495.

Western modern militaries want to employ this Newtonian stylization to war, so that an imagined orderliness is projected upon what is otherwise a messy, dynamic, emergent world. Metrics underpin formulaic models that are nested in Newtonian war theories (Jomini, Clausewitz, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, across terrestrial domains) that rose during the Napoleonic Era of warfare in parallel with the rise of natural sciences. Once these mechanistic “rules of warfare” are paired with metrics designed to provide engineered, linear, and objective positions of progress, one can force the system to progress along some line of effort toward the predetermined strategic goal or end-state. Along the way, reality does not comply, and the professionals waging war in such a Newtonian Style are forced to “fudge the numbers”, often for self-preservation, ego, identity, self-interests, or institutional conformity.

Many have suggested that such management data were self-delusional, with several sources (from conservative military analysts as well as liberal critics of the war) arguing that the numbers were routinely inflated, falsified or simply unknowable, presenting an entirely bogus picture of progress, population security, combat effectiveness and eventual victory. The trickery and falsehood of systems analysis and measurements of progress were the means by which civilian management dismissed military professionalism and judgement, and senior officers would degrade their own profession by copying these practices (Kinnard, 1977; Lewis, 2012). p. 498

McCann starts with World War II and quickly moves to Vietnam, using the infamous “Whiz Kids” and the mechanistic, hierarchical, and quantitative management movement that extended from earlier 20th century Taylorism managerial theory. Just like one might gain efficiencies in a vehicle assembly line to crank out 3% more cars per hour, war would be approached in similar fashion by these technical rationalists. Or as McNamara once said during the Tet Offensive when a staffer in the White House said, “I think we are losing this war”- he retorted hotly, “where is your data? Show me what I can feed into a computer. Spare me your poetry!”

He then weaves this into a continuous, institutionally championed war frame that would use different words and acryonyms but the same meanings in the post-9–11 era of counterinsurgency warfare (COIN).

Indeed, COIN is an ideology that obscures as much as it clarifies. It shares the managerialist obsession with tactics, operations and metrics of progress, which precludes serious discussion of the purposes of fighting and excludes public accountability over warfare, diplomacy and nation-building (Porch, 2013). COIN artefacts are peppered with nonsensical and simplistic diagrams suggestive of a vague and detached managerialism, yet a pernicious kind that shuts out perspectives from other actors across civil society (Klikauer, 2013: 2). The ‘activities matrices’, human terrain mapping models and network diagrams of the Afghan and Iraq wars are a rebooted McNamara-ism, and much of them are ‘fictionalized’ (Gantman, 2005), in that they are ideological in nature rather than practical. Some border on the bizarre, such as a ‘perception assessment matrix’ that appears in the much-hyped 2006 US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual or FM 3–24.7 (p. 503)

This is a deep, well-researched, and straightforward article worthy of consideration in any military program for education, and also for staff professional developmental activities where planners, targeting cells, and other elements that prioritize the data (metrics, bodies, kills, captures, and so-on) as “proof we are doing the plan right” when the plan is already failing, despite best efforts.

‘COIN’ becomes ‘money as a weapons system’. Warfare is rhetorically reframed as a business and management activity. Yet COIN in practice often prioritizes violence or ‘kinetic’ operations, with exponents of ‘non-kinetic’ methods derided as ‘tea drinkers’ for wasting time in endless meetings with ‘locals’. Body counts remain an important measure of progress combined with yet more indices against which to measure ‘progress’. War managerialism continues to act as a rhetorical shield behind which military ‘killing work’ is normalized and, as the remit of COIN extends into managing and policing ‘population security’, the scientific rigour of academic disciplines such as accounting, mathematics, statistics, anthropology and economics is also pressed into service. (p. 506)

For veterans of OIF and OEF, many parts of this article will hit home, particularly for those that were involved in many of the efforts outlined in the above quote. Raids, HVTs, missions with site exploitation leading to more raids… and the non-stop expectation that each school built, each road paved, each local leader granted resources, and every cup of tea shared would somehow translate into progress toward goals that were fantastic (as in, pure fantasy) from the start; this is also a useful article to introduce into discussions on what military reforms are needed institutionally, doctrinally, and into our preferred military models, theories, methods, and language. Otherwise, we will just continue to play “reform theater” and swap out more terms for new ones (irregular warfare becomes continuum, or competition along a continuum) while we never address the core ontological and epistemological failings of our war paradigm.

Thanks for reading, and check out the last article and commentary here in case you missed it: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/recommended-innovation-articles-and-commentary-9-disrupting-military-centers-of-gravity-with-7d0f5844a518