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Recommended Innovation Articles (and Commentary) 10: ‘Killing is our business and business is good’: The evolution of ‘war managerialism’ from body counts to counterinsurgency’
This is a series I am posting to Medium where I share links to articles concerning innovation, strategic change, design thinking, and related topics. People ask me frequently for article suggestions, and I also maintain several innovation distribution lists where I provide commentary and suggestions on one article at a time. All thoughts below are of my own opinion, and while most of the linked articles will be freely available, some may be behind paywalls due to where the article is published. Follow me on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn for new articles in this series.
This week’s topic is on the perpetual military fixation on quantitative methods, systematic logic and our expectation that in complex, dynamic systems (basically every war), we seek linear-causal relationships such as “more dead bad guys leads to increased security and stability”- yet outside of immediate, local and temporary contexts (tactical). this never materializes. This article explores the military obsession with metrics, using the Vietnam War and then the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as continuations of this institutional desire to frame war in a particular logic. Written in…
