Scott Gartner

Scott Gartner's (1997) book Strategic Assessment in War offered a

very fruitful and pertinent advance. He proposed that during war organizations measure

their levels of success with dominant quantitative indicators such as tons of shipping sunk

or enemy killed in action.

Gartner (1997), for example, proposes that states

switch strategies when they observe significant changes in quantitative military

indicators. Notably, this general dynamic challenges the assumption of current models

that the likelihood of a side winning a battle is the same for all battles throughout the war.

Strategic Assessment in War.

Gartner, Scott Sigmund.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997. 177pp. $32.50

One of the most vital yet difficult tasks a wartime commander must perform is strategic assessment. Are his actions working? Is he winning? Scott Sigmund Gartner, a political scientist at the University of California, approaches this problem from an interesting angle. He argues that during peacetime, military organizations devise certain quantitative measures of merit that will be used to assess the effectiveness of a given strategy. Once war breaks out, the strategy will be continuously evaluated against these criteria and adjusted as necessary. This is not a remarkable finding. However, Gartner then hypothesizes that the key measures of merit--what he calls the "dominant indicators"--will be watched most closely for the rate at which they change. In other words, if things are going badly, a commander or an organization will not necessarily change strategy unless the situation seems to be getting worse at an accelerating rate. Until that time, a commander will tend to muddle through. This is an important insight. In addition, organizations generally do not change their dominant indicators, partly because it would appear self-serving. As a result, even if a military organization chooses the wrong criteria for measuring its effectiveness, it is more likely to stick with it rather than change its strategy. Finally, Gartner notes that these dominant indicators may vary between organizations within the same country. This is crucial, because it means that two or more organizations can view the same situation, examine the same data, and arrive at totally different conclusions regarding the success of a war strategy because they are using different measures of effectiveness. Gartner tests his hypothesis in several case studies: the submarine campaigns of World Wars I and II, the ground campaign in Vietnam, and the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran in April 1980.

For the first three years of World War I, the Royal Navy eschewed the use of convoys to protect merchant shipping from German submarines. Despite heavy losses, and despite pressure from the British government, the Admiralty refused to change its strategy from one of offensive patrols. Even as shipping losses continued to mount and the government of David Lloyd George called ever more loudly for change, the admirals continued to resist