When the Department of Defense starts a new acquisitions project or program, the entire process is regulated by "Defense Acquisitions." Anyone in a program management role has to know this system intimately to move the program forward and to navigate the DoD approval and funding process.
More on the relationship between military decision making and the Surge below.
Defense Acquisitions is an extremely complicated world populated with Milestone Decision Reviews (and Authorities), Acquisition Strategy Reviews, Risk Management charts, legal mumbo jumbo, and numerous Program Reviews. It is such a complicated process that there is even a Defense Acquisitions University (DAU) to help train government and contract workers. I have even taken courses at the DAU in a past life.
One of the first things you learn about in Acquisitions 101 is how to define project/program success. The DoD uses three major "Key Parameters": Cost, Schedule, and Performance. Most of these management systems are taken directly from the business world so those with MBAs will probably recognize many of the terms (but sometimes there are subtle, but very important, differences). Before a project begins, you must define your threshold and object limits for each key parameter to determine success. For instance, for cost, you have minimum (objective) and maximum (threshold) budget numbers. If you do not fall inbetween your objective and threshold, you must account for that to your superiors. Schedule and cost are fairly easy to determine, but "Performance" can be a sticky one indeed. A tremendous amount of time is spent devising Key Performance Parameters.
One of the major rules when devising Key Performance Parameters is to only use metrics that you can control as a guide. If you cannot control something, you cannot make it the basis of determining "success."
So what does this have to do with the Surge? Anyone, and I mean anyone, at a certain level in the Department of Defense can tell you that you don’t let something completely out of your control, say, oh, the ability of another government to get its shit in order, to determine whether or not something succeeded. You cannot control that metric; therefore, you are completely reliant upon something outside of your control to determine success. Even a beginning program manager knows you cannot do that. You have to judge success on things that you can have an impact.
Using those criteria, the Surge was doomed from the beginning. It was very apparent that the Iraqi government was unable to come together to provide a political solution.
Although military campaigns are not acquisitions programs, I would assume the DoD would use the same logic when defining success.
On a side note, the military needs to regain control of this fiasco and reinstitute the acquisitions guidelines on Iraq contracts. As we have seen, the "no-bid" process is ripe for misuse and profit gouging. The "cost plus" fee system, while it defrays risk for the contractors, is cheating the American tax payer because there is so little oversight and poorly defined "goals" to determine contract success.