Harebrained Defense mission aborted in the nick of time 

Editorials 

30 July 2003
Chicago Sun-Times
47

In the rich and colorful history of really stupid ideas cooked up by the 
United States military, ranging from the 19th century importation of camels 
under the mistaken notion they would make good calvary animals in the West 
to the occasional exploration of psychics and seers as strategic military 
tools, few can rival the latest exercise in idiocy, which thankfully arrived 
stillborn: the Policy Analysis Market. 

Set to have begun Friday, before it was denounced by two outraged senators, 
the PAM's goal was to create a futures market in international strife. Just 
as traders use markets to make investment decisions on this year's corn 
crop, or how pork bellies will do next autumn, so traders would "invest" in, 
say, whether North Korea will launch a surprise attack or whether Yasser 
Arafat will be killed. 

The Defense Department at first defended the project, claiming it would tap 
into the predictive power of markets. "Research indicates that markets are 
extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even 
hidden information," it said in a statement. 

True, when you are dealing with information that can be aggregated. Thus, 
the price of soybeans for next year actually does represent all that can be 
known about acres planted and long-term weather forecasting and the 
potential demand when the soybeans are harvested. 

But when an event hinges on what is going on inside Kim Jong II's head or 
the plottings of an obscure terror group, the market loses its predictive 
function and becomes merely a death pool, an unseemly wagering on all 
conceivable dire events without any practical application. 

The whistle-blowing senators--Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Ron Wyden 
(D-Ore.)--called the $8 million effort "wasteful and absurd" as well as 
morally repugnant and grotesque. 

It is actually worse than that. It takes the bright image of the military, 
buffed by swift victory in Iraq and brave management of a bloody peace, and 
drags it in the mud, reminding us of the days of the Cuban missile crisis, 
when the military was famous for urging the most stupendous folly. 

The Policy Analysis Market did not last a day's scrutiny. It was in the 
headlines Tuesday morning and by lunch the Pentagon was furiously 
backpedaling, and we're certain a colonel or two will find their career 
paths shifting to forgotten military weather stations north of the Arctic 
Circle. 

And while we don't want to make too much of this epic folly--the military is 
an enormous organization whose overall quality is not fully represented by 
blunders such as this--on the other hand, this doomed program does serve as 
a reminder of what they teach soldiers in boot camp: That the actions of 
every single soldier reflect back on his or her unit, and on the military as 
a whole. The Pentagon needs to review what went wrong here and why the 
application of intelligence to this project had to wait until a civilian saw 
it in all its mind-boggling dumbness.