Analysis of Flawed Research

Analysis of Flawed Research

The following article analysis review by Team B illustrates and identifies several examples of statistics abuse in the practical world as a result of flawed research. The following examples demonstrate how a manger could and in many examples, does make erroneous decisions due to inaccurate statistics. The team has compiled the results by detailing the respective articles.

In the article, Pentagon Decision Making: seriously flawed, Karen Kwiatkowski witnessed first hand how erroneous and inaccurate information inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, affected the United States decision to go to war with Iraq. This business decision not only affected the Bush Administration, but also affected the entire country. The article suggests that certain parts of this information made its way into speeches given by President Bush in order to mislead America and gain support for the war in Iraq.

The following themes are identified in the article, (Kwiatkowski, 2003):

1. Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and active-duty military professionals assigned to the USDP/NESA and SP were noticeably uninvolved in key areas of interest to Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld. These included Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

2. Cross-agency cliques: Much has been written about the role of the founding members of the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy, and the American Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the Bush administration. Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to congregate, and that an overwhelming number of these appointees have such organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the various agencies - in particular the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Vice President.

3. Groupthink. Defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view,” groupthink was the predominant characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted "fact," and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view.

This article demonstrates how decisions were made based on intuition rather than credible data. The end result was data that was deceptive. It was suggested that the CIA told employees not to work with other security departments; the primary Iraq staff work was done by political appointees that never communicated with the Bush organization and that the groupthink process lead to deceitful information fed to Congress. To make a more informed decision in the future, independent data is needed, non-political staff needs be to involved,