Thanks for the clarification on the meaning of “kinetic activities.”

In general I agree with your assessment that no one measure determines “success” or “failure” of a particular program. Causality in the social world is as you say complex, and the choice of measures, etc., are inevitably embedded in the definitions and values. Those of us in academia have the luxury (and responsibility) to question the underlying assumptions behind real world situations, and you raise this point well in your response to my posting. I hope that the importance of questioning the nature and meanings of success and failure is communicated by the HTS people on the ground.

However Col. Schweitzer is working in a bureaucratic world, in which the pressure is always to evaluate success or failure, and justify short term program effectiveness. This happens in a political context in which goals and values may change quickly. Given this real world demand, how success or failure is “operationalized” is important, particularly because nuance cannot always be recognized. Colonel Schweitzer implicitly does this in his Congressional testimony when he correlates the arrival of HTS teams with the decline in the number of kinetic activities. In my mind, the question is how effectively does this measure the effectiveness of HTS? As I wrote in the ethnography.com post, I am not sure that the question is answered as well as it could be by the techniques described by Col. Schweitzer to Congress. I would hope that the HTS social scientists are already raising similar questions (and in the context of the points that you raise in your post) with army officers !
like Colonel Schweitzer.

Having said that, I doubt that kinetic activities as you define them are the best measure of HTS success or failure. As you point out, there may be many reason that commanders decide to order such actions, only some of which are related to cultural analysis such as that provided by HTS. This does not mean that HTS is effective or not, only that I cannot tell given the type of testimony published to the web by Colonel Schweitzer.

Tony Waters