War By the Numbers
A key lesson from Vietnam is being lost if enemy body counts are seen as a measure of progress
The body count has returned. It started slowly, but now it has become a regular occurrence. On June 21, for instance, American military officials in Afghanistan reported killing "approximately 40 enemies" southwest of Deh Chopan. On June 30, marines reported killing a single insurgent during "Operation Sword" in western Iraq. On July 2, the military reported that a patrol northeast of Kandahar "killed two enemies, wounded another, and captured two." On Independence Day, the military command in Baghdad reported detaining 100 "suspected terrorists."
It was just over two years ago, during the initial Iraq invasion, when Pentagon officials repeatedly swore they would not get into the practice of counting enemy bodies. There is good reason for the aversion. Body counts became an obsession of the military brass in the Vietnam War and, as it turned out, a misleading indicator of how the war was going. Today, military historians say that obsession led to inflated numbers that in turn had a corrupting effect by undercutting trust, effectiveness, and morale. "It was a pretty useless statistic that did more harm than good," says Conrad Crane, director of the Military History Institute at the U.S. Army War College. "There was a sense in Vietnam that the officer corps lost its way. Once you lie about the body counts, what else do you lie about?"
Who's an insurgent? Although there is no independent way to gauge the body count, the numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan do not seem to be consciously inflated as they were in Vietnam. During last month's "Operation Spear," a Defense Department news story--citing press reports--initially said that marines had killed "more than 100 insurgents" in the western Iraq town of Karabilah. But by the end of the operation six days later, the Marines had rolled back the claimed enemy body count to 47.
Still, any numbers pose problems. There may be 47 bodies spread out on the streets of Karabilah, but who are they? Since the dead are not talking, it is impossible to know for sure who was an insurgent, who was a member of a local militia, who was a criminal smuggler, and who was an innocent bystander. What's more, since the military knows neither how many insurgents there are in Iraq and Afghanistan nor how many foreign fighters are being recruited to the cause every day, there is no way of telling the military significance of any reported number, whether it's three or 12 or a hundred enemy combatants.
The top commanders in Iraq and at the Pentagon continue to assert the uselessness of body counts. Lt. Gen. John Vines, who oversees military operations in Iraq, says as long as ordinary Iraqis can be recruited for $150 to lay a roadside bomb, it does no good to count how many insurgents have been killed. To Vines and other commanders, the important numbers are those showing how many Iraqi troops have been trained and equipped. Unfortunately, since the definition of "trained" is slippery (and, in some cases, the numbers inflated), that statistic has proved to be as imprecise as the number of Viet Cong killed in a given month.
If it's not important to the brass, why are body counts creeping back into military press releases? In part, Pentagon officials say, body counts allow the public to gauge the size and presumed effectiveness of individual military operations--and with polls showing declining public support for the war, commanders are intent on showing progress. But the counts are even more important to the troops. Many soldiers and marines are looking for signs that their sacrifice has not been fruitless, that they have been accomplishing something during their time in Iraq. "For marines on the ground who have watched their buddies die," Crane notes, "it means something to them to inflict damage on the enemy."
This story appears in the July 18, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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