The McNamara fallacy is the West’s major Achilles’ heel | Daniel Hardaker

Vietnam, Afghanistan, the gender pay gap and COVID

The more power the alternate reality of quantitative data metrics and buzzwords holds, the more we lose the ability to intuit the world. 

As I sat down to write this, a WhatsApp notification buzzed from my day job. It was marked urgent, warning that without the completion of such-and-such Health and Safety training this week, delivered via a desktop app (which required downloading) and constructed by a third-party tech company, we would be ‘unable’ to work.

‘Completion’ of the training doubtless fulfills some condition for the providing of insurance, and also justifies the existence of someone in HR whose responsibility it is to administer it. A quick look over the training material, however – and this will be familiar to anyone who has undertaken some form of online learning within the last few years – is a series of 25-minute-long videos, not specific to the business, in that omnipresent flat, childish, ‘Corporate Memphis’ (also known as Alegria) style, telling you, ‘don’t-run-with-scissors’ style, that which you really already out to know. These are followed by multiple choice questions, and getting the question wrong incurs no penalty. You choose until the choice pings green.   

Due to the ease at which the training can be gamed, and the vagueness of its messages, the majority undertaking the training will not pay attention to the videos. Not, however, that doing so would make behaviour any safer. Nonetheless, the psychology of ‘completing’ safety training leads one to neglect intuition and alertness in favour of trusting in the machine, with predictable consequences. The whole network of data, checklists, and quotas creates an illusion, an alternate reality that does not correspond to the six inches in front of one’s nose. It drags both the individual and the society into a make-believe much more absurd than that which is frequently the target of derision by those driving the new world forward, religious devotion. As Western society becomes drowned in surplus information and metrics, the effect increases.

In a recent Jerusalem Post article, Graham Planter, a former US Army NCO, addressing the defeat of the Afghan state by the Taliban, states directly that the state and its institutions collapsed so spectacularly because they simply did not exist outside of the data metrics which had been created to convince ourselves into believing that they did.

“Meanwhile, higher-up officers were tabulating the number of ‘key leader engagements [KLEs]’ and other rubrics of success… If you sit down with dudes in a village and they say they want a road built and say they will tell you when the Taliban will come and they say they love America, but you know it’s a sham, and no one wants to say they failed and suck at their job, so instead of lying, you choose a metric that is kind of vague that you can reach conclusions from.”

From my own time in the British Army, I can attest that these kinds of gripes – centred around the disconnect between the reality on the ground and the ‘play-along-to-get-along’ corporate patois of the seniors –could be heard time and time again from veterans of the Helmand campaign. Tales of Afghan policemen, policemen largely in name only, using their ISAF backing to settle inter-tribal scores or – with impunity – abusing young boys in the practice of bacha bazi, with the consequences of such things then being ignored by Western leaders in the rush to add one more point to whatever success metric they had invented, were common. 

  But this is not a criticism specific to the British Army, such a dynamic is increasingly the norm across most of our institutions and companies. Take the so-called gender pay gap, which, as has been elsewhere shown repeatedly to be a false proposition created by the crudest means of data collection, full of glaring important omissions, has nonetheless occupied, and continues to occupy, the time and money of government and HR personnel across the country.

The bias in favour of the most easily quantifiable data is not, of course, new. Phillip Rufus, in ‘Why Vietnam Matters’, attributed the behaviour of Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense during the early years of the Vietnam War, in reducing the complexities of human conflict to a mathematical model chiefly regarding enemy body count, to have been a major factor of the US defeat. 

The above held wide mainstream acknowledgment, to the point that the bias itself has taken McNamara’s name. However, perhaps due to the rapid digitalisation of the West in the decades following Vietnam, these lessons were forgotten in the enthusiasm for the white heat of new technology and the complacency of ‘winning’ the Cold War.

The response of the elites to the breakout of SARS-Cov-2 is, perhaps, the apotheosis of such a way of thinking. Measures which demonstrably do not work, and which have cataclysmic civilisational consequences, are pursued with zeal due to the ease at which they can be put on the big board. Now, more than ever, we need to reassess and fast.

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