Interesting take on what could use improving in Iraq from The Econoclast
It’s really hard not to think that the U.S. Pentagon has mismanaged the war in Iraq. Have they been using a misunderstood production function, trying to over-substitute capital for labour? It is hard to tell for sure…
Certainly the war in Iraq isn’t actually going “badly” in terms of historical comparisons, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. I seriously doubt that anyone at the Pentagon has thought about the “production function” of capital and labor in producing whatever, enemy deaths I suppose. Perhaps they should. On the other hand, it looks like the capital intensive method is working fairly well in Fallujah with a roughly 30 to 1 ratio of enemy to friendly deaths.
Update: More like a 50:1 ratio of enemy to friendly deaths according to the latest figures I’ve seen. (1200 vs. 24). Then again the number of troops was upped to 16,000 from the roughly 2,000 involved in the earlier failed assault on Fallujah, so the point re: the oversubstitution of capital for labor may have been valid.