text: Assessments
  * How many insurgents are caught and jailed may be an important MOE. However, the number
  convicted and sentenced by government judicial authorities and remaining in jail over time is
  also an important MOE of governmental capability and corruption.
  * The number of recruits available for an insurgency can be an important indicator of the
  government’s and the insurgency’s legitimacy.
  * An MOP based on the number of patrols in a given area over a period may not be as effective as
  the persistence of patrols in a given area over the same period of time.
  * An MOE based on the amount of money seized may not be as important as an MOE based on
  denying funding sources. It may simply show an increased flow of funds into an area.
  12-25. When developing MOPs and MOEs, commanders and staffs avoid developing MOPs or MOEs
  that highlight what a commander and staff are actively doing to defeat an insurgency. For example,
  building a number of schools can be used as an MOP, and the number of students in the school can be used
  as an MOE. However, these activities may have no effect on an insurgency at all. Commanders and staffs
  connect MOEs and MOPs to their operational environment and insurgency. Accepting the assumption that
  what one is doing is actually relevant to defeating an insurgency is an easy means to undermine the
  effectiveness of MOPs and MOEs. Commanders and staffs avoid the trap of thinking that because they do
  something and measure it, it is important.
  12-26. Commanders and staffs generally avoid measures that lack context. For example, the number of
  enemy killed, without any context, is normally a dangerous MOP. The number of enemy killed can indicate
  that the insurgency is increasing its recruitment and capabilities, thus more insurgents are being killed in
  more attacks. Commanders and staffs establish some context in any measure that they use.
  12-27. Vietnam highlights the importance of creating an assessment framework that is contextual to the
  insurgency and is relevant to actually measuring success. In Vietnam, U.S. leadership made assumptions
  about what were important measures of success without connecting those measurements to situational
  understanding. Many U.S. leaders did not actively question their assumptions. Even worse, their ineffective
  assessment framework had an influence on operations.
  Measuring Effectiveness and Performance in Vietnam
  Historical accounts of the conflict in Vietnam vary widely in the points
  emphasized and the explanations offered. Disputes are facilitated by the different
  personal experiences of many different direct observers who saw or participated in
  sometimes very different slices of the conflict at different times, at different
  operational levels, and in different parts of the country. What, if anything, could have
  been done to change the outcome of the war and who to blame for that outcome
  remains fairly hotly contested. What the outcome was, however, is not contested:
  U.S. forces withdrew in 1973, and the Saigon government fell to the combined
  pressure of the insurgency and North Vietnamese regular forces in April of 1975,
  unequivocally a counterinsurgent loss.
  The literature on the U.S. military’s Vietnam-era assessment process is
  highly negative; even the most strident defenders of the assessment reports
  produced during that period expressed some dissatisfaction with the process.
  Assessments of the Vietnam War varied in type, purpose, and intended consumer.
  The entire process changed and grew between the early 1960s and the early 1970s;
  there was no single “Vietnam War assessment.” There were many assessment
  processes, and many were burdened with murky objectives, measures that were
  poorly connected to those objectives, and poor data collection. Quantitative data of
  questionable veracity were used to make optimistic prognostications, such as the
  illusion of a trend toward “a light at the end of the tunnel.” Distrust of Vietnam-era
  military briefings became so endemic that members of the press corps referred to the
  daily military press briefings as the “five o’clock follies.”
  The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV, was the theater-
  level military command in Saigon, South Vietnam. MACV was the neck of the funnel
  for nearly all field reports on operations, intelligence, pacification, and other data