Why Operations Assessments Fail: It's Not Just the Metrics.

摘要

In any military campaign, commanders, politicians, and the general public all desire to know whether the effort is succeeding. For conventional conflicts, well developed theories of war give a good understanding of the objectives to pursue and how to pursue them. These theories also enable the derivation of well defined metrics for progress, such as terrain held, numbers of enemy fighters killed or captured, or amount of enemy equipment and materiel destroyed. In unconventional conflicts the theories of war are more complex, objectives and ways to achieve them are less straightforward, and notions of winning and losing are more difficult to define. As a result, it is alsomore difficult to gauge and demonstrate progress in such conflicts. For the specific case of counterinsurgency, however, gauging and demonstrating progress is at least as important as in a conventional war, since the former tends to last longer and therefore requires sustained political and public support to conduct and such support is often tied to proof of progress. Thus operations assessment, designed to show whether progress is being made, should be a vital part of any unconventional conflict, especially counterinsurgency. For the current conflict in Afghanistan, assessments of progress have been highly criticized.