The measure of success

Spearheaded by the Pentagon’s office of Advanced Systems and Concepts, a group of DoD and civilian officials has been struggling to forge a consensus on so-called “measures of effectiveness” in the global war on terrorism…

“Our tasking was to come up with some good alternative ideas, and the fact that the ability to measure how you were doing was a good idea was one of the initial things that came out of the game,” said Gary Anderson, a former Marine colonel and frequent DoD consultant who ran a series of Pentagon-sponsored war games which examined alternative strategies to waging America’s war on terrorism… The Pentagon-sponsored team concluded that the war on terrorism is essentially a global insurgency, where discontiguous groups that share a radical Islamic ideology are waging a campaign against the ideologies of the United States and its allies. Therefore, Anderson’s team argued, U.S. strategy should incorporate many of the same methods used to counter classic insurgencies, including covert military and police actions; political and economic reform; and the winning hearts and minds…

Anderson’s team came up with a series of broader trends that would allow U.S. policy-makers to see how well their strategies are working to defeat terrorism…

And, as Michael Barone recently noted, surveys in the Muslim world now indicate that America’s war on terror is far more effective than the body counts and bomb blasts in Iraq would suggest. The message conveyed by these attacks on U.S. forces and the steady progress toward democracy there could be indicative of what Anderson’s group is getting at: Success in the war on terror is as much about killing the bad guys is as it is about coaxing others away from an Islamist path.

Excerpted from an article by Christian Lowe in the ‘Daily Standard’, August 24