The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding
I believe the McNamara Fallacy is a real thing, although I would say Goodhart&#x27;s Law expresses the more fundamental issue.  But, the examples they give (Vietnam and Afghanistan wars) are bad examples, because in both cases the issue was primarily not that the U.S. military was relying too much on quantitative metrics, but rather that it was being asked to do a job which militaries are not good at.<p>In neither case, despite what many deniers and apologists proclaim, was the war &quot;winnable&quot; by the military, because in both cases the primary problem was that the government of the nation in question did not have the respect (and thus support) of its people.  There is no strategy that an outside military can use, which will fix this, because it&#x27;s not a military problem, and a military has the wrong personnel, the wrong training, and thus the wrong institutional mindset.<p>It is as if you sent the Red Cross in to defeat the Viet Cong or the Taliban, and then concluded that the reason they failed was that they were measuring numbers of hospital beds and counting how much medical equipment they needed.  It was the political leadership, who decided this was a job for a military to perform, that was the root problem.  McNamara&#x27;s metrics were neither here nor there.