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.
I also think about the problem of metrics and CS-21:
The problem is that the process of building relationships between navies is distressingly similar to Max Weber's description of politics as "the strong and slow boring of hard boards." And in the case of the Cooperative Strategy, it's hard to tell just how deeply we've bored the boards at any given time. The objectives of the Cooperative Strategy are both long-term and difficult to measure. At the early stage, it is difficult to differentiate between a world in which CS-21 succeeds brilliantly and one in which it fails utterly. Indeed, CS-21 could succeed on its own terms by creating productive relationships, yet fail to support the grand strategic objectives of the United States -- deterring China while simultaneously integrating it into the international community -- without anyone having a good sense of how to measure its overall effectiveness. Moreover, although public and congressional scrutiny of naval doctrine remains low, CS-21 has critics within the maritime community who can point to its lack of measurable progress as an argument to overturn it.
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