Reality is too complex to model with numbers.
A famous example from WW2 was American statistician realized the German industry was continuing to grow despite massive bombing raids. This caused the military to switch from bombing factories to bombing people which strengthened German’s resolve to fight on. The reality was that weapons being made in the new German industry were generally crap and what the bombing raids were doing was reducing the quality of German arms which in turn reduced German fighting effectiveness. But this couldn’t be modeled statistically so it was ignored.
The most effective part of the US bombing campaign came in the last 6-8 months of the war where we targeted Germany’s transportation grid instead of its factories or people. The results of attacks that couldn’t be modeled by statistics. These attacks caused the Germany industry to grind to a halt as rare materials and food we were no longer able to get from point A to point B. If we’d listened to the air force generals urging attacks on the transport grid instead of the bean counters the war would have been over in late 1944.
Moral of the story: Never trust a bean counter.
*** “Never trust a bean counter” ***
Where to start ...
May start with GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out)
Bean Counters don’t do Tactics so if Air Force Generals were taking Orders from the inept it was either Politicians, other Generals, poor Intel on the ground or most likely Politicians, Bankers and Royals.
The beauty of the US Forces in Europe WW2 was the lack of communications perceived or fabricated allowed those on the ground to do what they needed to do to get the job done with Great Leaders like Patton.