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by rawgabbit 793 days ago
The problem, for the US involvement in Vietnam, was that "body count" was irrelevant. The only metric that mattered was the willingness to fight of communist Vietnam, China, and the USSR. The problem is that "will" is not numerical. It is willingness to fight among the political elite of those countries and they include domestic factors, economic factors, and military factors. If anything, McNamara's fallacy is like comparing the iPhone and Android and saying the only thing that matters is screen size.