Thursday, January 22, 2015
But it's so easy
Measuring success in any conflict can be very difficult, even years after the shooting has stopped. However, as we live in an age that demands everything instantly, body counts are often provided by the military as markers of progress to an all to often undelineated success. The US, at the urging of The Big Bean Counter Robert McNamara, relied on body counts during the Vietnam War, and successfully proved that they were meaningless as a measure. Nowadays, the US military swears on a stack of M-4s that they don't use it, but don't believe them.
Since the Vietnam War, with its gruesome and inflated U.S. tallies of enemy dead, the Pentagon has denied keeping body counts. But, in fact, the military does add up the number of enemy fighters it believes it has killed — and proudly boasts of the totals in official documents that it never intends for public circulation.They are easy, require no explanation and warm the hearts of bean counters everywhere. How can you not use the only metric that everybody understands?
The disconnect over wartime body counts reflects a yawning gap between the military’s public face and its private culture.
As early as the 19th century, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz warned that counting enemy dead was a misleading measure of an army’s effectiveness, to say nothing of a war’s soundness. “Casualty reports,” Clausewitz wrote,“… are never accurate.”
A body count is “no accurate measure of the loss of morale,” the celebrated military theorist emphasized. “The abandonment of the fight remains the only authentic proof of victory.”
In other words, no one really knows how many of your enemy you need to kill to compel the remaining forces to surrender...
Eleven years after Fallujah, the Pentagon has again suppressed any officer’s impulse to publicly mention an official body count. Hence Kirby’s insistence on Jan. 6 that adding up the dead is “not the goal.”
In reality, the body counts have merely gone underground, so to speak. Spokespersons deny tallying the dead. But the official annual histories of various military commands continue to trumpet high body counts.
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