Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

I'm sorry but this is a serious (and arguably offensive) falsehood.

A 'free fire' zone is an area wherein there is no requirement for soldiers to coordinate heavy arms fire with other units via HQ etc.. This is a very reasonable policy in jungle fights where units can come under ambush at any time, i.e. "We're in an ambush and we're about to die, can you ring up HQ to see if we can shoot back?"

But the notion that US forces would just designate an area where everyone including civilians are to be killed is an outright and offensive lie.

Though there are some situations in which Army Units did actively and knowingly fire on citizens, these are known and well documented tragedies of soldiers acting with fury in the moment agains villagers who were supporting insurgent forces - this was not and never was any kind of US policy, and the perpetrators faced Court Martial.

The Vietnam war is so completely misinterpreted in pop culture; even to this day, it's disturbing.

And thus for performance measures, "security through obscurity" can make sense.

Even disregarding the potential for negative externalities etc., profit alone can still be a terrible KPI.

I worked for a large engineering consultancy that was very profit motivated. They figured out a brilliant way to maximise profit: get rid of business development! Only pay for work when clients are paying you to do it. This was GREAT for quarterly profit margins, at the expense of the project pipeline.

As the pipeline dried up, they figured out a new way to maximize profit: get rid of engineers! The customers are big, stupid organisations, and it'll take them a long time to notice. You can totally maximise quarterly profit margins until they do.

And that's how you can simultaneously be highly profitable and in a corporate death spiral.

Moral of the story: reality is a fundamentally complex place. You need multiple KPIs to get a handle on it -- and ideally those KPIs should be mutually contradictory enough to force you to engage with that complexity head-on, rather than boiling things down to game-able metrics which ultimately will defeat themselves because they are such a poor proxy for reality.

No, it's not remotely delusional.

What's delusional and troubling is the degree to which this war is completely misunderstood in pop culture.

The US handily won the Vietnam war, full stop.

In classical terms is was a clear and unambiguous outright victory.

Think of Korea for example: a stalemate, whereas the US obliterated their oppponents in Vietnam.

The US hardly lost a single battle and losses in the war are consistent with the losses forces have in a 'regular war' - it's just that they seem large today's because the US hasn't fought against capable forces. Losses were consistent with Korean war, just a decade previous.

The Vietnam experience is often misunderstood because the US technically did spend a very long time there, they had trouble initially with the South Vietnamese insurgency, because the US eventually resorted to heavy bombing campaigns with too many civilian casualties, and because of complex political issues such as North Vietnamese forces hiding out in Cambodia etc..

But really the 'hard war' was not very long - you can see the troop buildup and then withdrawal here [1]

The US 'under committed' to the effort early on, and then did a slower build up to defeat the insurgency, and relatively handily defeated them after the buildup and then withdrew after a major air campaign.

The length of direct engagement by US forces in Vietnam is shorter than for Iraq and Afghanistan, and roughly on par with Korea. The number of US casualties was roughly on par with Korea as well.

The Vietnam war is understood by most people via Hollywood films and very poorly conceived documentaries. It was a turning point in some ways because it's the first time that American citizens were given insight into how horrible war actually is (i.e. reporters on the front lines etc.).

[1] http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm

Yes; the real problem is when a proxy is substituted for what is really wanted - for example, when lines of code written is taken for a measure of how much usefulness has been created, or the percentage graduated is taken as a measure of the effectiveness of education.

Proxies are not intrinsically bad, either, but they have to be difficult to achieve without also achieving what you really want - when this is not the case, making the proxy measurement a target motivates people to seek workarounds.

Life expectancy might be a proxy, but it is a pretty good one.