Word: metrication
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Tallying the enemy's dead as a metric of battlefield progress was discredited for a generation in the U.S. military after the Vietnam debacle, but the body-count measurement appears to have been revived by the Army in Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the 101st Airborne Division has been publicizing each enemy death - for a total of nearly 2,000 - over the past 14 months. That news has already renewed the debate over the wisdom of relying on such numbers. "This isn't going to do anything to convince the American public that we're winning...
...sorts of data to determine how the war was going. The emphasis on those numbers led to some commanders' emphasizing killing over winning and to inflated body counts - which often included counting civilian casualties as enemy dead. "The Army's selection of the body count as its primary metric may not only have contributed to losing the war, but in the end it proved so morally corrosive that it led to a crisis of soul-searching in the postwar officer corps," William Murray wrote in 2001 in Parameters, the Army's scholarly journal; it then led to a discrediting...
...were winning if the body count went up and losing if the body count went down." Relying on such numbers distracts from the fact that the outcome of the war is more likely to be determined by the political will on each side. The body count "is not the metric that's appropriate for an insurgency," Rumsfeld said...
NICE uses a metric called "quality-adjusted life year," or Qaly, which grades a person's health-related quality of life from 0 to 1. Say a new drug for a previously untreatable condition comes on the market and the drug is proven to improve a patient's quality of life from .5 to .7 on the scale. A patient on the drug can expect to live an average of 15 years following the treatment. Taking the new drug thus earns patients the equivalent of three quality-adjusted life years (15 years multiplied by the .2 gain in quality...
...laws, provided that the Environmental Protection Agency issues a waiver, which was denied under George W. Bush.) For Obama, the simple fact that these habitually warring parties were willing to come together on the new requirements was as important as the 1.8 billion bbl. of oil and 900 million metric tons of greenhouse gases the rules are expected to save. "In the past, an agreement such as this would have been considered impossible," he said. "What everyone here believes, even as views differ on many important issues, is that the status quo is no longer acceptable...