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I’m watching the excellent Ken Burns documentary “The Vietnam War” right now, and this is a subject that is briefly touched on. The US was collecting such a vast amount of data and metrics during their war, quantifying everything, that they simply could not process it all. They didn’t have the minds or the manpower to make sense of it all.

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Keep in mind that was over 60 years ago. Computers now have much more CPU and storage space and ethernet bandwidth is also much bigger (currently hundreds of gigabits per second) and constantly increasing. We live in an unprecedented age of battlefield transparency. I don't have any clearance at all but I am allowed to pull out my credit card and buy time on a satellite to take photos of an area in Ukraine to confirm destroyed equipment or track wildfires. There has never been a time like this in human history.

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