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Gartner, Scott Sigmund. Strategic Assessment in War. 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,...