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Comment by mr_tristan | Hacker News Reader

One insight from reading about Vietnam, was that the US military actually was largely achieved the goal it set out for. It was strategy of attrition, and they were able to post very positive metrics throughout.

My sense is that with more technology, you get more focus on metrics, not less, with an even greater likelihood of choosing the wrong strategy.

So I read this is less of a "good vs evil" debate. It's just that when you are up close to the evil, you are really left questioning, "is the end really going to justify the means". If you are far away, you just see "hey, we're winning".

Thus, this "bad war" is less of a statement of "evil war" but _ineffective_ war.

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I'd take issue with that -- the US Military was able to put up certain goalposts and make a credible claim that they hit them. The problem was that the point of the conflict was poorly defined, and victory was even more poorly defined. Bodycount was used as a metric for doing something.

IMO, Vietnam was a vanity war against an idea ("Communism"), and remote warfare is bad because it lowers the cost of vanity conflicts dramatically.

If I need metrics in a historical narrative to keep score, nobody is winning. That's the problem.

One of the first rules you learn when working for the US military is, if your kick doesn't go between the goalposts... find a way to move the goalposts.

Every military contract/mission officer wants one thing: to claim success for their project at the end of the year. They quickly learn the best way to do this is to reshape the metrics for success so that, whatever the outcome was for that year, you can claim that was the real objective all along. In the space of R&D contracting, it turns out that "blind the generals with flashy demos" does that rather well.

Of course, that also requires that the original mission objective be phrased in ambiguous terms so "goalpost" and "kick" remain freely fungible concepts. To that end, in 1964, "Defeating Communism" fit the bill nicely. Today it's "Defeating Terrorism".

Right, the more technology you add, the more kinds of metrics you can track, and it just adds complexity that allows for more "reshaping" of results.

Since "victory" is often very hard and messy to define, I just expect the more tech we offer, the more we're going to "win", because of this effect.

When it comes to Vietnam I recall a phrase I heard a long time ago: "We successfully executed a misguided strategy." I take it to mean we were killing the ever-living shit out of them, but doing so did NOT contribute to our strategic desires. But the numbers! They looked great on the weekly report!

Fascinating that you could also read that as executing, as in putting to pasture, said misguided strategy. Not sure that reading would be very true though.

> the US military actually was largely achieved the goal it set out for

Yes--the US literally bombed villages of innocent people because maybe someone had written a Viet Cong slogan on the wall. It then counted these huts as "enemy structures" and "munitions factories." All civilian casualties were indiscriminately counted as enemy combatants.

That's literally what the US government did, while supporting an oppressive feudal government trying to crush a populist uprising (which was considered as obviously illegitimate because they were not Christian and capitalist).

KPIs, everyone.

It's also part of why black communities in the ghetto are harassed by police officers. If you have to hit growth numbers, you start going after people who aren't doing anything wrong and arresting people on bogus charges.

Problem was VN was both a Civil War and a proxy war between two ideologies vying for supremacy.

Yes, and the side of the civil war that we picked (because it was compatible our proxy war) was anything but just.

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