According to a famous but probably untrue story, in 1967 Pentagon analysts asked a computer when the United States would win the war in Vietnam, and the machine answered that it already had, in 1965. The story, if it points at anything at all, points at the Hamlet Evaluation System. Beginning that year, about 250 American advisers graded roughly 12,000 South Vietnamese villages and hamlets every month, from A to E, on security, politics, and development. Their answers were punched onto cards in Saigon, processed on IBM mainframes, and shipped to Washington on magnetic tape.
Moritz Feichtinger, a historian at the University of Basel, studies how states have used computers to measure and manage populations. Rather than only reading the memos about HES, he works with the original data files, preserved in a military format almost no software can read today, and tries to rebuild how the system actually worked. In this episode, he explains what an adviser did when he rated a hamlet, what survives of the system and what has been lost, and what happens when a village becomes a number.
