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The example with the US military lying certainly demonstrates another issue with over valuing metrics - making sure you have good data. People who get wrapped around metrics also tend to not look at the data they are being presented. One of the issues McNamara had was he was receiving inflated body count figures. [0] Not only was he measuring the wrong thing, he was measuring it badly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...

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It's also a good example of perverse incentives or "gaming the metrics" (in a horrifying way). If the main measure of success was body count, and every kill was considered an enemy by default, this encouraged just killing people and counting them as successes.

I was in Vietnam in a Naval Support Group. I had conversations with army officers that had combat experience and learned that since no statistics were collected about dead civilians all the dead were counted as enemy soldiers - and everyone from the top down knew it.

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