A Management Engineering Analysis
By Jesse
Brogan, Management Engineer
In my studies as a management
engineer (specifically in my effort for the development of prosperity
engineering), I have learned to look for the hidden costs that modern leaders
are unable to see without technical help.
The challenge in this paper is raised by the political furor maintained
by anti-war activists. Our effective
analysis will have to put this war into a larger reference frame, one where we
can more-effectively evaluate its impact on our civilization.
With the typical cynicism of
the engineer, I was doubtful that any benefit can be gained by the return of
our military prior to attaining objectives.
With the analysis below, I have had to rethink this.
As a start, we have 140,000
soldiers in a war zone in
This ignores the obvious
truth that there is rarely any expenditure that could not be made better in
some people’s perspective. The question
is more whether there is intelligence that can be provided to evaluate the
expenditure – perhaps some use for our people in combating an element that is
more dangerous to us.
What is it that we really
have at risk? We need an evaluation of
the cost of having these soldiers engaged in a war.
The most valuable things we
have, as human beings, are our lives.
With a natural understanding of this, our news media has focused on Loss
of American lives in its presentation of the war to the public. The next most valuable is the time we have to
live. Next to human life, personal time
expenditures are where we have the most personal value.
My first observation is that
we have lost much less than 3% of current war manning in the whole five year
war effort! To this expenditure, we add
the personal time of 140,000 citizens who are actively engaged in pursuing the
war. As a first answer which puts our
personal war risk into perspective; this war is expensive in manpower, but not
all that great a threat to life; especially in comparison with past war
efforts.
But this is not the end; we
need a comparison with another threat to our peace and prosperity. I have chosen to compare it to the American
income tax. Consider the burden of this
war in relation to the burden placed upon our civilization by our system of
personal taxation.
The tax system requires
citizens to fill in complex Government forms, under a law that even full-time
tax experts can’t seem to understand so that they agree with each other.
Start with 125,000,000
American tax payers, each putting in their average of 8 hours effort reading
manuals, gathering records, creating files, and mailing forms. The result is an expenditure/loss of
1,000,000,000 man hours of our personal time.
At 2,000 man-hours per work year, this equates to 500,000 man-years of
effort expended every year; and that is only direct citizen time, not the
payroll of the IRS.
For an initial perspective,
this amount of manpower should be enough to annually rebuild the
As to manpower, the 140,000
soldiers in the Mid-East is a substantial expenditure of manpower, but pales in
reference to what we are expending just to support the way our government funds
itself through demands placed upon its citizens.
Even that is not sufficient
for perspective because it addresses only time, not lives.
Consider the threat to life
associated with the income tax, with its threat of audit and prosecution for
errors (a well-recognized source of personal stress). If we lose only one tax-payer per million to
heart-attacks and strokes from tax-time stresses, we are losing more people to
income tax than to the Mid-East war.
While this indeed satisfies
our starting need for developing a perspective, it also raises a new
challenge. Which is the more the
dangerous enemy of prosperity in the
And so in answer to the
question of the propriety of expenditures of lives and manpower on the war,
perhaps we have found a more deadly and expensive threat to our way of
life! In spite of my initial leanings, I
might support bringing our troops home to fight on the new front should we
declare war on the IRS.