Screwing the numbers in an uncomfortable place...

By Dave Anderson:

The US Army knows how to manipulate numbers, especially embarrassing numbers so they don't look so bad, or they look even worse then needed in order to "justify" a favored policy or to flip a vote or two.  Nothing too wrong with any of that, this is just normal bureaucratic functioning in an ill-defined data environment where most decision makers either are incapable or unwilling to really look at the numbers and their implications or apply memory and analysis to the numbers if they do look at them.

Fred Kaplan at Slate does a good job of looking at the 100% or better recruiting story that the Army is pushing.  The numbers are getting screwed in an uncomfortable spot that is not the backseat of a Volkswagon:

According to the Pentagon's report, the
Army's goal for fiscal year 2009 was to sign 65,000 new recruits. It
actually signed 70,045�amounting to 8 percent more than the target.

But
the picture is less bright than it seems. Though the Pentagon's report
doesn't mention this fact, in each of the previous two years, the
Army's recruitment goal was 80,000�much
higher than this year's. The Army met those targets, but only by
drastically lowering its standards�accepting more applicants who'd
dropped out of high school or flunked the military's aptitude test.

This year, the recruiters restored the old standards�a very good thing for troops' morale and military effectiveness�but they signed up 10,000 fewer new soldiers....

But the Army reduced the recruitment goal�and reduced the retention
goal. The size of the Army is in fact shrinking. It may look as if it's
growing�the Pentagon report gives the impression it's growing�but it's
growing only in comparison with the officially set goals.
What the report leaves out is that those goals have been lowered, in
some cases dramatically. Is the Army engaging in deliberate deception?
Did someone lower the goals so that it looked like the Army was doing
much better, when it was really doing a little worse?

This is not the first time that the numbers have been fiddled with to make someone look a whole lot better.  At my old blog, I routinely tracked recruiting numbers, and the May 2005 report was a golden oldie for numerical trickery:

The New York Times
is reporting on the May recruiting data for the active duty army. And
it is a doozy: between 25% and 38% short with little hope of
improvement. Why the wide range in the shortfall? Simple --- I was wrong on how the numbers would be massaged
--- instead of combining Army numbers with the better Navy and Air
Force numbers, the Army just decided to cut their objective by 1,350
recruits in the middle of the recruiting month.

So the Army was
able to find 5,000 new recruits instead of the 8,050 that they
initially wanted, and 6,700 that they finally decided that they wanted.
With the new objective, this month does not look that "bad" compared to
April, and comparable with March's numbers.