I was preparing for orals on a proposal this morning when my private secretary rang to say that Miller from the Pentagon desperately needed to talk to me. I didn’t have much time, but Miller’s organization has been a pretty good client, and, as they say, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush – follow-on work is a consultant’s bread and butter, after all.
Miller: Hello Tom, Miller at the Pentagon here. Sorry to call you like this…
Tom: No problem, what can I do for you?
Miller: Well, you know, Tom, we here at the Defense Department have to report to the White House on the Iraq war in September.
Tom: Everybody in town knows that.
Miller: Yeah, sure. But I got stuck with preparing the report, Tom, and it’s a total [expletive]. I mean, we’ve got to show progress, you know – the Joint Chiefs don’t want to hear any bad news.
Tom: And guys like you aren’t about to tell them any…
Miller: You bet your boots, trooper!
Tom: And therefore, the Joint Chiefs never hear any bad news.
Miller: You got it, Tom. That’s pretty much how the system works over here at the Pentagon. And “accentuating the positive,” as they say, is no picnic where this Iraq thing is concerned.
Tom: I can imagine.
Miller: But we’ve managed to do a respectable job so far. I have lots of what they call “anecdotal evidence” that our guys are defeating the insurgents on all fronts, pushing Al Qaeda to the wall, driving all those infrastructure projects toward eventual completion, training the Iraqi army and police to behave like civilized defense and law enforcement professionals instead of like thugs, and winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Tom: Glad to hear that. So you have the good news that the Joint Chiefs and the White House want to hear in September?
Miller: That’s the problem, Tom. You see, to tell the truth, we have just about as many other stories that indicate the opposites of all of those nice things.
Tom: But you aren’t going to include those in the report, because neither the Joint Chiefs or the White House want to hear any bad news.
Miller: They’ve made that abundantly clear. So no way are we including those bad stories in the report.
Tom: Sounds like a viable bureaucratic strategy to me. It’s not like you and your staff got us into this thing.
Miller: That’s exactly how we see it, Tom.
Tom: As would be expected. So what’s the problem?
Miller: The Big Kahunas made it known that the report can’t just contain positive stories about how well we’re doing in Iraq, indicating that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel which we are rapidly approaching. They claim that the press, the public and the watchdog groups aren’t going to buy it. So first of all, what do you think of that assessment? Seems to me that the press are so afraid of seeming biased, they just report most anything said without any effort at critical thinking.
Tom: Generally, that’s true these days. Like last week, when the owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine told the press that there had been “an earthquake,” the press just went ahead and reported that. At the press conferences, I never saw anybody say “Hey, buddy, this is Utah. Your mine is nowhere near any tectonic subduction zones and there aren’t any active volcanoes around here. How can you say there was an earthquake?”
Miller: You mean there wasn’t an earthquake?
Tom: Hell, no – even USGS wouldn’t call it that. They said they had recorded a “seismic event.”
Miller: That’s not an earthquake?
Tom: All earthquakes are seismic events. But not all seismic events are earthquakes. An underground nuclear test causes a seismic event. So does an explosive mine collapse.
Miller: Oh, I get it.
Tom: Yeah, but nobody in the press had enough smarts to ask that question. So I’d say your expectations concerning the press are accurate.
Miller: What about the watchdog groups, then?
Tom: They’re another matter entirely. I’m sure that the White House and your bosses at Defense are concerned that those folks will be all over you like white on rice if the September Report contains nothing but happy talk. Now, as far as the American public…
Miller: The American public? Screw the American public! Who cares about them? What can we do about these watchdog groups? What do they want to see?
Tom: Statistics.
Miller: Statistics?
Tom: Yeah, they will, at minimum, demand some kind of quantification for the progress we’re making in Iraq.
Miller: Okay, great! I’ll get my staff on it right away! Thanks!
Tom: You’re welcome.
So I went back to preparing for the orals on that proposal, finished up, and met with the other contractor team members. Then we went to the meeting and responded to a bunch of moronic questions from a group of civil servants at the Department of Housing and Urban Development who were primarily interested in showing their supervisors, who were in attendance, how clever they were. As often happens in such situations, a grand contest developed between a couple of HUD bozos, with each of them trying to outdo the other in constructing questions of increasingly arcane complexity and exponentially decreasing relevance. The first one delivered her questions in an affected and not terribly accurate attempt at Oxford Received Accent, no doubt having convinced herself that sounding like an announcer on the BBC is the royal road to success in Washington. Her occasional lapses into a New Jersey accent betrayed the fact that she requires more practice at the ruse, however. The other one, a fellow whose huge frame sported a three-thousand dollar Bruno Cipriani suit from White Flint Mall, delivered his entire oration in pure, flawless Ebonics. The general effect was like watching Madonna debate the finer points of public housing policy with Biggie Smalls.
It got to the point where all we had to do was sit back and blow smoke up their keisters. By the end of the session, the road apples had piled up so high, we could have responded to one of their questions with a stanza of “Jabberwocky” and it would have made about as much sense as the ongoing discussion. In short, all went very well, I’d say, and it looks like we’re going to get the work.
When I returned to my office about three in the afternoon, Miller called again.
Miller: Hi, Tom, it’s Miller.
Tom: How’s your statistical analysis going?
Miller: Well, we’ve done okay with some of them, but the combat casualties, the infrastructure, the restructuring and readiness efforts with the army and the police…
Tom: Re-define the categories.
Miller: What?
Tom: Instead of reporting straightforward categories like “killed,” “seriously wounded and unable to return to action,” “seriously wounded and currently hospitalized,” “seriously wounded and returned to action,” and “wounded and able to return to action,” try combining previous and current combinations of things like “killed and seriously wounded,” “wounded and returned to action” and so forth until you get numbers that show a favorable trend. Then report those.
Miller: Oh.
Tom: You can do the same thing with any statistics you get reported in disaggregated form.
Miller: “Disaggregated?”
Tom: You do have statisticians on your staff, don’t you?
Miller: I… uh, no, not… directly on my staff.
Tom: You mean you don’t have a statistics section assigned to development of the September Report?
Miller: Yeah, we do, but it’s only got three people in it, and none of them actually have degrees in… math or anything. They’re career civil service, you know…
Tom: But I assume you have one or more qualified contractors assigned to each of your staff to do their jobs for them?
Miller: Sure, of course we do. That’s standard civil service procedure. Every civil servant gets a contractor to do the actual work. Union rules, you know.
Tom: Got a PhD mathematician or statistician among those?
Miller: Yeah, one of each.
Tom: Okay, tell them “introduce favorable Type II error through selective definition of statistical categories.”
Miller: … through selective definition…
Tom: … of statistical categories.
Miller: Right. Got it.
Tom: So – you slice up the data various ways until you show favorable downward trends for the bad stuff, like casualties, and favorable upward trends for the good stuff, like infrastructure. You can put together a spreadsheet for each statistic you’re going to report and diddle with the definition of the categories until everything looks rosy on every spreadsheet.
Miller: Outstanding! Bye!
I spent until around five thirty doing some actual work myself – as opposed to responding to Government solicitations or helping light dawn on Marblehead over at the Pentagon. I made some serious progress at it, too. By then, my private secretary had gone home and the phone just rang in my office. It was Miller.
Miller: Tom, we got started on massaging the statistics like you said, and it’s working just fine.
Tom: Glad to hear that.
Miller: But about three-thirty, I got a bunch of polling results and I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to figure how to put them in the September Report without making us look terrible.
Tom: What kind of results?
Miller: Oh, Jesus, Tom – anybody who sees what the Iraqis think about our current efforts is going to know we’re screwing the pooch over there!
Tom: Like what?
Miller: We got this – 72 percent disapprove of the way we’re handling the situation in Iraq. Only 3 percent think our efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq are going well. Sixty-six percent of them want us to decrease or remove our troops immediately. Only 19 percent of them think the 20,000 troop surge did any good. Sixty-three percent think America’s losing the war against the insurgents and militias, and only 45 percent think America could ever win. Fifty-nine percent say we should get out even if the Iraqis can’t establish civil order after we leave. Sixty-four percent think that it will be more dangerous to live in Iraq next year no matter what America does. Only 4 percent think that the Iraqi government is competent. Sixty-five percent of them disapprove of their president. Seventy-five percent of them think their country is on the wrong track, and 74 percent of them disapprove of their congress.
Tom: “Disapprove of their congress?”
Miller: That’s what it says, Tom!
Tom: You have a hard copy of that?
Miller: Right here in my hand.
Tom: Fax it to me immediately.
About ten minutes later, a fax arrived. I examined it and called Miller back.
Tom: Miller? This is Tom Collins.
Miller: Wow, that was pretty fast.
Tom: You can stop worrying about those poll results.
Miller: I can? That’s fantastic… I guess. Uh, how come?
Tom: Those aren’t the results of a recent public opinion poll conducted on the citizens of Iraq.
Miller: Well, then, what the hell are they?
Tom: They’re the results of a recent public opinion poll conducted on Americans. Looks like one of your staff got things a bit mixed up.
Miller: Really? What a relief! I mean, damn it, I’ll nail that [expletive] [expletive] to the wall! How could anybody do that?
Tom: I can’t imagine how a member of the United States Civil Service could possibly do something so monumentally stupid and egregiously incompetent.
Miller: Right! Sure, it’s obvious! It was one of those [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] contractors I assigned to help him! Ah, present company excepted, of course. No offense intended.
Tom: None taken. Bye.