© 2011, Small Wars Foundation July 6, 2011
Military Metrics: How Do We Know When We’re
Winning (or Losing) a War?
by Ethan B. Kapstein
How do governments know whether they‟re winning or losing a military campaign? That
question is devilish enough in the context of conventional wars with pitched battles, as conflicts
often take surprising twists and turns en route to their endgame. It was more than sheer bravado
that led Charles De Gaulle, who knew a thing or two about military operations, to declare in June
1940, “France has lost the battle, but France has not lost the war.”
Precise knowledge of a conflict‟s progress is perhaps even more difficult when it comes
to the counterinsurgencies now being fought in Afghanistan and, somewhat more surreptitiously,
in places like Yemen. How do military leaders and policy-makers ascertain if they are “winning
the hearts and minds” of the local population? What are the indicators of success?
Military history suggests that generals and public officials have often looked at the wrong
data—the wrong metrics—for information and insight about what‟s really happening on the
ground. The Vietnam War provides a poignant example (Nagl 2002; Kilcullen 2010). As late as
the summer of 1974, a study group from the U.S. House of Representatives boldly asserted that
“it is unlikely that the North Vietnamese can win a military victory” and it shared the view of the
American Ambassador to Saigon, Graham Martin, that South Vietnam was now on the verge of
an “economic „takeoff‟ similar to those which have occurred in South Korea and Taiwan.” The
congressional group drew this conclusion from the lopsided difference in military casualties
between North and South Vietnamese forces—the infamous “body counts”—which cast doubt
on the ability of Hanoi to sustain the constant pummeling much longer. Needless to say, Saigon
would fall to the North within nine months of that study‟s publication, with Ambassador Martin
departing by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy‟s rooftop.
Has the military become more sophisticated since that time in formulating and analyzing
a relevant set of war metrics? To be sure, in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) is relying upon a much more comprehensive data-set, which not only includes
casualty statistics and numbers of attacks and “improvised” explosions aimed at coalition forces,
but also incorporates economic and social developments along with “Afghan in the street”
responses to a wide variety of survey questions. Unfortunately, these metrics provide little more
than a hodgepodge of trends, data, and “atmospherics,” and it‟s unclear how they relate to the
war effort. In fact, this grab-bag of evidence suggests only one thing: that coalition forces still
don‟t know how to measure their progress.
SMALL WARS JOURNAL
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