The Metric System
By My column on piracy, metrics, and grand strategy is up at World Politics Review:
Most notably, the report highlighted the lack of any good cost-benefit analysis of the anti-piracy effort. The United States has no idea how much economic damage unchecked Somali piracy could cause, and thus it has no idea how much economic loss anti-piracy efforts prevent. More importantly, the United States doesn’t know how much it spends on anti-piracy efforts, or how to effectively calculate the costs that it, and other countries, pay in order to prevent pirate attacks. No one has made the effort to tally all of the costs associated with the naval deployment, or with the various other efforts to construct an anti-piracy framework. In short, we cannot conduct a cost-benefit analysis of anti-piracy efforts because we know neither the costs nor the benefits.