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Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief? The next time a president wants to take the USA to war, or ente
by Pyxl101 11y ago
Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief?
The next time a president wants to take the USA to war, or enter any armed conflict, I'd like to see that announcement be accompanied by (or followed shortly thereafter by) a GAO or similar accounting report estimating probable outcomes and costs. The same report should include an appendix that summarizes recent similar reports delivered in past armed conflicts, analyzing their accuracy with known actual costs. (E.g., that appendix should report this fact about the Iraq war and the updated estimate for the new war should take into account the sources of inaccuracy that led to the underestimation).
In software engineering, at least part of the job is doing something new every time. If it wasn't new it wouldn't need a human - it would just be a machine doing something repeatedly. I imagine that war is to some extent the same way, in that no opposition force is exactly the same; yet a lot of war must be loosely similar in cost, barring major technological changes. (E.g., cost per square mile of territory held by infantry or cost per civilian population or cost per enemy combatant; cost per square mile of enforced no-fly-zone, etc.)
Say, where are all of the data scientists? You'd think that you could draw some interesting conclusions analyzing data about the costs of war, assuming it's publicly available. For example, a histogram of dollars spent month by month per province of occupied territory - is such data public? I don't think I've ever seen much in the way of interesting visualizations, outside of the occasional flashy news article.
- p4wnc6 11y agoIt's super easy to defeat this kind of constraint. Just claim that if we don't act immediately, the bad guys will kill freedom. There's no time for a GAO! You want to jeopardize the eternal fate of freedom and the triumph of evil because you want a budget proposal!? Put that on CNN and Fox News. Now the old people want war. Smart people are caught wasting their time in an engineered debate about whether there is or isn't time to first plan a budget. While everyone is riled up, Congress side steps the whole thing and we just begin with whatever military operations they wanted.
- Pyxl101 11y agoIt takes a while to go to war or enter armed conflict at scale (on smaller scale, certain force units like Marine Expeditionary Units and certain commando teams can move pretty quickly). The President should have the authority the Constitution gives him to do that. I'd just like to see the GAO rushing alongside that process to prepare expected financial outcomes, to be shared with American citizens and press who will be evaluating the pending action.
- rodgerd 11y ago> Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief? Colin Powell stood up in front of the UN and lied his arse off about "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION" and the only presidential candidates I've ever seen call this out are the rank, nominally unelectable outsiders like Sanders, Paul, and Trump. What on earth makes you think the voters who don't give a shit about the government lying their way into a war on the topic of chemical weapons would care if there were lies about the money?
- baddox 11y ago> Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief? You presume that spending money isn't one of the primary goals of some military campaigns.
- alanwatts 11y agoEspecially considering how often their family fortunes are made in oil, industrial, and banking industries -- the trifecta of the MIC.
- Zigurd 11y agoIt should be simpler than that. The US went to war without declaring war. This meant there would be no capitulation. No formal occupation. No end to the pseudo-occupation. No plan for what to do when the same patrol got blown up on the same road as last week and the week before. If we had stuck to the recipe for how to do war, we'd probably not be in the mess we are in.
- tosseraccount 11y agoU.S. Congress authorized both Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution
- Zigurd 11y agoThese are not actual declarations of war against sovereign nations, and that's the problem. There are numerous other problems that follow from that. But, basically, Congress opened the door to the Executive starting a war on their own. It's not clear that the conditions for going from diplomacy to war laid out in these resolutions were actually met, but once a war was started, Congress lacked the balls to reign in the Executive by refusing to fund an undeclared war. And so on into the abyss. As noted in other posts, Congress is writing even more squishy and open ended "resolutions" regarding ISIS. I'm not trying to be pedantic or legalistic about declaring war. But, in practice, abandoning that rigor appears to have been disastrous.