Does what commanders choose to measure create perverse incentives in war?

That's the suggestion
made by Leon Blanken (of the Naval Postgraduate School) and Jason Lepore (of
Cal Poly) in a paper I read on the flight home from
Kansas City. As they put it, "the manner in which one measures progress
incentivizes the behavior of those who are conducting the war."

For example, they
say, the use of the "body count" in Vietnam "incentivized large-scale killing
and destruction, which worked against the goal of building a viable political
regime in the South."

But I am not sure I
agree with their assumption that the "principal" (the policymaker back in
Washington) "possesses more strategic information about the conflict" than does
the "agent" (the commander in the field). Looking at Iraq, I would say that
with the first three commanders in Iraq, neither side had more strategic
information. Then, when Petraeus took over, he actually knew more strategically
than his bosses (Gen. Peter Pace, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and President
Bush) did.

BTW, if you plan to read
this paper, it helps to like math.