Opinion post by Mark Turner

Last night, the Golden State Warriors defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers to take a 3 game to 2 advantage in the NBA Finals. Both teams know what they have to do to become champions in the best of 7 series.   It made me wonder about our military wars and warriors.  Do we really have any meaningful metric to measure the success of our heroic warriors? What does winning our war even look like?

Then, the Northrop Gumman ad from the Super Bowl airs.  This ad features an awesome new war machine that looks like a UFO from another world.  I found it truly stunning.

The ad ends with the ‘Value of Performance’ slide.  It made me wonder if the only real metric that anyone cares about in our war is the ‘value of performance’.  Here is the 2 year stock chart for Northrop Grumman:

Here is Locheed Martin:

General Dynamics anyone?

Judging from these charts,  it would appear that there is a metric for the success of our war.  Please tell me that there are better ways to measure the success of our war than these stupid charts!