I linked to one article as an example, a couple more below.
I keep seeing superficial, positive coverage about this system and it has been bothering me for awhile because it seems like an awful idea. Sure reward your most talented personnel but also only rewarding what you can measure, especially in war is a horrendous idea in my opinion…
Rewarding and valuing only what you can most easily measure is a reliable route to self imposed disaster and ineffective optimization.
This system goes a long way towards over-emphasizing drones as well to a degree that is dangerous to good doctrine, any impact that isn’t neatly quantifiable like a drone clip becomes a liability and blindspot to this approach it seems to me.
What about units that aren’t getting enough support and resources to be effective? Does rewarding them less make them more effective…?
Certainly empowering soldiers to get the equipment they want and are requesting is great, but the idea of making this like Call Of Duty is weird to me where only the people currently experiencing success are rewarded, it will breed toxic institutions obsessed with maximizing gain to the exclusion of all else like those that are strangling the US.
I am sure I am getting an incomplete picture, but it seems worrying from what I can see.
Not could, will this isn’t a potential phenomena that may occur, it is part and parcel to quantifying things that you ignore the things you cannot quantify easily. It is unescapable the second you begin to take data, which is another way of saying that the idea that data can be non-biased is inherently absurd.
This is a major struggle in any kind of performance review in almost any area of human endeavor and if it isn’t recognized explicitly and loudly that the metrics do not capture the reality and that the map is not the territory than it begins to very quickly degrade effectiveness and rationality in an organization.