Ukraine Urban Recovery: Of Mines and Metrics, 1 of 3
Brutal Catalyst: What Ukraine’s Cities Tell Us About Recovery From War, available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJ8Q7BGJ
A continuation of discussions drawing on Brutal Catalyst: What Ukraine’s Cities Tell Us About Recovery From War, released October 8, 2024.
Russian POM-3 Anti-Personnel Mine [Source: Operational Environment Data Integration Network, “POM-3 (Medallion) Russian Anti-Personnel Mine,” US Army Training and Doctrine Command G-2 Worldwide Equipment Guide, undated, https://odin.tradoc.army.mil/WEG/Asset/POM-3_(Medallion)_Russian_Anti-Personnel_Mine, image is in the public domain]
Russian minelaying in many cases seems to have little purpose other than to kill civilians or delay repair of damaged structures and infrastructure. The occupiers destroyed Kherson’s main television tower, water supply system, and several electrical substations as they were ousted by Ukrainian forces in November 2022, leaving residents without communications, heat, or clean water. Were the destruction not enough, the Russians mined areas to delay repairs or cause casualties among those attempting them. Munitions included types not seen elsewhere such as the particularly heinous POM-3 shown in the above image. Though Ukrainians managed to achieve partial restoration of electricity fairly quickly, the resulting difficulty in accessing water infrastructure features meant it was longer before the essential fluid once again flowed in taps. As result of the prolific use of mines by both sides and other forms of unexploded ordnance (UXO) contaminating Ukraine, demining has unsurprisingly become and will long remain a lengthy, costly, and sometimes fatal undertaking. It will require billions in dollars and potentially decades in time. (Note that while demining is but one part of UXO neutralization, I nevertheless occasionally use the term herein to represent all UXO disposal for conciseness purposes.)
I was fortunate in being able to interview several brilliant demining experts when writing Brutal Catalyst. Their challenges in Iraq, Syria, and now Ukraine were extensive—are extensive,—sometimes gruesome, and often have dramatic immediate economic consequences. Those challenges receive considerable attention in the book beyond what I can address here. Suffice it to say they encompass far more than the ever-dangerous demining activities alone. Those economic consequences have company in the difficulty of designing helpful UXO neutralization metrics, measures gauging effectiveness while also identifying procedures that minimize injuries. Further complicating the issue: these measures need to be understandable to both those within the demining community and others outside. Just what constitutes a well-designed demining metric is harder to come by than one might think. Some donors are still mistakenly impressed when informed of the total number of mines neutralized or low cost per square meter of land cleared. Easy to grasp, such metrics can mislead, meaning donor dollars go to less beneficial processes and less effective organizations.
The issues confronted by those responsible for demining in Ukraine have a long ancestry. Colonel Gregory Fontenot commanded a US Army brigade during its 1995-1996 deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Coordinating mine removal was one of his unit’s responsibilities. Fontenot briefed a senior leader on progress at one point, relating that the brigade had seen neutralization of 3,000 mines. That senior leader was impressed, but as is the case with deminers in Ukraine today, Fontenot was aware that the raw number meant little. His brigade’s area of responsibility contained an estimated one million-plus mines. Three thousand mines was a drop in the proverbial bucket (less than 0.3 percent for those interested). The number removed was a measure of effort, a metric relating not much other than the work done. What was significant were the consequences of that labor: its measure of effect. Clearing those 3,000 mines had opened forty-five otherwise unusable traffic routes.
Measuring progress toward desired ends is an arena as rife with pitfalls as helpful advice. (Yes, I was tempted to write “minefields” but restrained myself.) Further, the deficiencies found in poor UXO disposal measures touch on more than demining undertakings alone. One study focusing on strengthening Ukraine’s regional and municipal governments provides a lengthy collection of metrics in its conclusion. Too many of the table’s cells reflect only effort expended. The reasons for the shortfall are easy to grasp. Forerunners to such faulty practice include the notoriously ineffective measure of effort employed by the coalition in Iraq—dollars spent on projects—that was convenient to compile, easy to understand…and worse than useless. With hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into recovery, simply recording how many dollars went to what projects was far easier than gauging the consequences those expenditures brought about. Yes, the metric was easy to tally, easy to understand, and universal across all project types. It also applied to projects overseen by any type of organization regardless of nation, NGO or IGO character, or contractor outfit. However, ease of calculation, simplicity of understanding, and universality are insufficient justifications for metric design. Negative consequences in Iraq included dollars spent ineffectively, to include tens of millions lost to corruption. The measure promoted spending on larger projects rather than those of lesser dollar amounts that might have been more valuable. Putting a large sum toward a single project eases administration. It involves fewer contracts, fewer project managers, fewer reports, and less in the way of resources generally (transportation, security assets, quality control experts, and the specific metrics someone needs to design to measure each project’s effectiveness).
Confusing effort for effect (or settling for an easy-to-collect and simple to display measure in lieu of one effective) is so common as to have become a norm. The dangers, however, go beyond merely poorly informing decision-makers and fund allocators. Poorly designed metrics can motivate wasteful or, even worse, harmful behaviors. Metrics inherently establish goals. Goals are something motivated leaders seek to achieve. The dollars spent metric motivated quick and plentiful expenditures poorly monitored. Measuring a unit’s combat effectiveness in Vietnam by the number of enemy killed (body count) made killing more foes an objective for ambitious leaders. In that case, the poorly conceived metric incited counterproductive and sometimes outright bizarre behavior, to include less ethical leaders reporting noncombatant dead as enemy. Halfway around the world, hospital administrators in the United Kingdom directed patients be left in ambulances; a national health policy resulted in penalizing hospitals based on length of time taken to treat individuals after ambulance delivery. Universities are notorious for easy-to-measure but ineffective, even counterproductive measures. How many books and journal articles a faculty member writes is often key to promotion and tenure. Assessing how well one teaches or the impact of those writings—much tougher to determine—too often relies on dubious statistics…if any attempt is made to measure them at all. A case involving the logistics company Maersk provides a nearly perfect example of a confusing effort for effectiveness. Maersk’s “call-centre employees were judged on the time spent per complaint. [When] the firm changed the metric for judging success from time spent to other factors, such as issue resolution, customer satisfaction nearly doubled.” [Bartleby, “The secret to cutting corporate red tape,” The Economist 438 (March 13, 2021): 63, https://www.economist.com/business/2021/03/13/the-secret-to-cutting-corporate-red-tape]
Next time: More on the consequences of good and bad metrics.
Previous trivia question: Why did the Allied forces going ashore on D-Day at Normandy land when tides were low (and thus much more beach was exposed and had to be covered before reaching cover) rather than high tide or thereabouts?
Answer: Explanation from the US Army Center of Military History’s Cross-Channel Attack by Gordon A. Harrison, pages 189-190:
“Low tide uncovered at OMAHA Beach a tidal flat of an average width of 300 yards…. Outcroppings of rock off the beaches in the British zone would not permit a landing at low tide. But landings on all beaches had to be roughly simultaneous to avoid alerting the enemy before the entire mass of the attack could be applied. The happy mean seemed to be an H Hour three hours before high water. Since there was a two-hour stand of high water, the time thus decided was…only one hour after low tide.”
In short, factors included:
The need to land approximately at the same time on all five beaches. Given the distance from one end to the other and other geographic and tidal features, low and high tides were not the same for all beaches.
The need to have sufficient tide for landing craft to not hit rocks off Gold, Juno, and Sword (the British Commonwealth) beaches but low enough that German obstacles on all beaches would be exposed, allowing engineers to destroy them before the tide came in and concealed them from later-arriving vessels.
Though landing at a lower tide meant more beach for individual soldiers to cover under German fire, landing too close would have exposed landing craft to deadly, virtually pointblank shorter-range fire before men could have off-loaded.
Next question: How many women are buried in Normandy American Cemetery?
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Russell W. Glenn, Brutal Catalyst: What Ukraine’s Cities Tell Us About Recovery From War (Boulder, CO: KeyPoint Press, 2024). Available in hardback, paperback, and eBook at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJ8Q7BGJ.
For media inquiries and review copies, email: editor@keypointpress.com
Discover more about the war in Ukraine and recovery at: www.ukrainecities.com
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