Wall Street Journal:
BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan -- Body counts are back, reigniting the decades-old debate about whether victory in war can be judged by measuring the stack of enemy dead.
How the U.S. military counts enemy dead. - By Phillip Carter ...
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Obama's reaction to this bogus war is starting to make me think of Richard Nixon. It is never good when a part of someone's actions reminds you of Richard Nixon
Body counts are back - holy Jesus. My first tour in Vietnam, I had a friend whose only job was counting dead VC and NVA. He was a busy boy and we killed record numbers of the bad guys, but somehow our victories on the battlefield did not result in winning the war.
Almost 50 years ago now I became somewhat knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare while on the faculty of the Army Intelligence School and service with the Special Operations Group (MACSOG) in Vietnam.
The lesson I learned, which might seem counter-intuitive, Ya can't beat them by killing them.
I also studied Afghanistan, in which we now find ourselves entrenched. There, primitive tribesmen defeated the Brits in the 19th century and more recently the Russians. During the First Afghan War in 1842, a British Force of 16,500 soldiers and civilians from India managed to capture Kabul, after which they found themselves besieged. Following months of fighting, the sole survivor of this force, an army doctor, arrived at British lines in Jalalabad.
Body counts?
Nice move. It worked so well for us in the past.
Here are the "numbers" for Iraq: http://www.governmentalityblog.com/my_weblog/2009/05/iraq-in-numbers.html
Perhaps, the next book that Brother Hugo sends to President Neo shouldn't be one by Lenin.
How about instead S. Colin Gray or Jeffrey Record on guerilla warfare?
Colin's 12 reasons why the US is incapable of winning a guerilla war might be enlightening.
This latest focus on body counts is not only reminiscent of failed strategies of the past but fits quite neatly into Colin's analysis.
Here's the link
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=650
The use of body counts as a metric for success is the surest sign yet that the effort in Afghanistan is a failure. Almost instantly the people on the ground will feel the pressure flowing downhill for ever increasing body counts, and will respond accordingly, with lies and bu11$hit. It will be even more like Vietnam, always "winning", but never won.
The clowns in charge will be making decisions based on the career oriented lies of low level personnel.
"It will be even more like Vietnam, always "winning", but never won. "
Yeah ... it's reminiscent of Rumsfailed when he was asked if we were winning in Iraq. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, that we must be winning because we hadn't lost a single battle. The only reassuring aspect to our duel debacles is that the military now knows that nobody stateside blames them for the failure - because with ill-defined goals, an unwillingness to commit genocide on the populace, poor planning, no exit strategy and all the other aspects of the Powell Doctrine being absent, failure was and is a foregone conclusion. As long as the press picks up on the correct story, which is that, unlike in previous wars where body count was a measure of victory, everyone in America should be made to understand that body count is a very important metric, but that it is a measure of failure. For every "enemy" killed, more hearts and minds are lost, because the battle our forces are asked to participate in has no military solution.
8
As a Vietnam Veteran I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is the same Bullsh*t the Policitians and Generals came up with when they didn't have a clue of what to do in Vietnam.
Hey, it's how we won Vietnam...oh...wait...
Bizarre. Each dead has or had at least 2 relatives who loved their son or daughter protecting their land and home. Also a cousin is probably to be counted and an aunt, uncle, brother, sister.
Each of the remaining alive knows at least one other person whom they will share their grief with over the lose of their hero who was fighting against the invaders.
Over the long term they know they will win, their history shows they fought Alaxander the Great, the arab armies, the hordes of barbarians, the Great British Empire, the Indian armies and now the coolition of the willing western barbarian hordes with their many colored burdens.
Bizarre.
Nothing quite like revisionist history for sheer entertainment value.
I think the correct word is "revises" not "revives". Yeesh.
look it up you are wrong. This a long buried LBJ/Nix oni an Nam policy that has been resurrected. or revived if you will, not something they are tweaking or "revising" Yeesh indeed
LOL you want transparency with the torture photos but you don't wan transparency when they list the de ad.
You people are bloody hypocrites.
You people?
??
Body counts might serve some purpose for military analysts, but to publish them in the hope of bolstering support for war is hideous and shameless.
They are always reported up after the engagement. Should it be reported as a measure of success? Probably not. Should it be hidden? Probably not. I don't know why the military would this as a metric of success instead of provinces secure, elections, etc.
They shouldn't be hidden, but they shouldn't be promulgated by the morning papers and the evening news like they were baseball scores, courtesy of Defense Department and the executive branch.
it makes a losing battle sound like you are winning, like Viet Nam were it was last used.
Do the body counts include "collateral damage?" So, some guy with a string and a bunch of beads wanders through bodies trying to figure out, first of all, what country they're from and then is it a bad Afghanistan or a good one or is it an American or some other nationality with brown eyes, if he has eyes. So many bodies, so few beads.
Come on home - butt out.
It is utter madness, cheering body counts of the resistance who want nothing else but their countries back from our illegal invasions and occupations.
Loading comments…
First Posted: 05-31-09 07:51 PM | Updated: 05-31-09 07:55 PM