War, McNamara style
From the very nature of the insurgency, to use of such phrases as “Iraqification” and “Winning the hearts and minds,” to the absence of a viable exit strategy for U.S. forces, it is difficult to view the war in Iraq as anything but another Vietnam.
Even, it appears, employing body count as a means of measuring success has been dusted off for use in the War Against Terror (WAT) - something the Pentagon said early on, and in no uncertain terms, it would not do. ("We don't do body counts” asserted CENTCOM General Tommy Franks, in response to a journalist’s question about the war in Afghanistan. You can’t get any clearer than that.)
The use of body count in Vietnam, a “metric” dreamed up by “whiz-kid” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, eventually became a weapon wrested from the hand of its owner and turned against him. With the advent of body counts as a yardstick, Vietnamese, both young and old, male and female became targets of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, particularly in free-fire (read: anything goes) zones. Anybody killed, either by accident or by design, became an insurgent for the purposes of cooking the books. Then, of course, came the phantom VC, where a body count of 10 or 100 in reality became 100 or 1,000 in after-action reports (the numbers were often inflated by commanders looking for promotions).
However, soon the “embellishment” got the best of them and reports of battlefield successes by senior commanders began to be used as ammunition against the White House by opponents of the war. After Vietnam, use of body count became verboten, not to be used even during the Gulf War (probably because coalition forces killed a disproportionately high number of Iraqi soldiers and the slaughter wouldn’t have made good PR).
But body count, it appears, is back with a vengeance.
According to the Washington Post September 19 (U.S. Claims Success in Iraq Despite Onslaught): “After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west. [Maj. Gen. Rick] Lynch, the [top U.S.] military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region. The fact that the number of insurgents killed or captured in the northern city of Tall Afar was roughly equal to advance estimates of their strength, he said, was proof that insurgents weren't simply escaping to fight another day -- and that U.S. forces were doing more than razing infrastructure. ‘Zarqawi is on the ropes,’ Lynch told reporters.”
Lynch’s remarks are reminiscent of promises made to the White House by senior commanders in the field, the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary McNamara, that once “the lines intersect" (i.e. the number of killed or captured VC meets, then exceeds the number of insurgents flowing across the border from the North) victory will be imminent. The promises proved to be hollow and victory was not to be, as it became evident that field commanders did not have a handle on the true number of insurgents coming down from the North or of those already in the South.
The Post article may be read to imply that the U.S. military has just lately begun to use body count as a yardstick in the WAT. However, according to Julian Barnes at USNews.com (7/18/05) “The body count has returned. It started slowly, but now it has become a regular occurrence. On June 21 [2005], 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.’”
Barnes’s litany hardly scratches the surface. Nearly every day, media outlets echo body count information released by the military that day or the day before. CNN, for example, said September 18 that according to the U.S. military “Coalition forces killed six insurgents in Northern Iraq…during raids on al Qaeda safe houses.” The day prior, CNN reported that “Two Taliban rebels were…killed during fighting in Kandahar province Thursday [September 15]…Eight suspected rebels were arrested…On Saturday [September 17], U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops caught 20 militants laying explosives along Kajaki Dam in southern Helmand province.”
Reports of battlefield gains may sound good to the average American, and that’s probably who they are being directed at. But as Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, comments in the Washington Post piece: "The question is, what does victory mean? It certainly isn't the number of people we kill or detain.” Cordesman maintains that the U.S. death and detention counts have “zero credibility," since U.S. forces provide little detail on those being killed and detained. As the Post item notes, “Since 2003, U.S. forces have detained 40,000 people, twice U.S. generals' highest public estimate of the number of fighters in the insurgency.”
Although they make good headlines, use of body counts fail as a key metric because they don’t stand on their own: Without knowledge of the ultimate size of the enemy force and of the potential pool from which the enemy may draw, body count doesn’t tell you much. So 100 are killed – what if the enemy’s total force is one million? So you take 50 out in a firefight, but the enemy acquires 100 new recruits the same day, are you better off? The Pentagon and White House certainly tried to make the people think so back in the day, and it appears they are trying to do the same thing now – making people think there is light at the end of the tunnel. But there is no light. Says Cordesman: "On a day-to-day basis, the overall level of security is obviously low. We can't secure the airport road, can't stop the incoming into the Green Zone, can't stop the killings and kidnappings.” Sounds an awful lot like Vietnam. (Indeed, as this was being written, eight American soldiers were killed in Iraq, bringing the total number of U.S. troops killed there to 1,907.)
It is important to note that use of body count as a metric is a key component of an attrition strategy that the U.S. supposedly proved doesn’t work (and it cost them 58,000+ personnel to do so). The war in Iraq was not supposed to be a war of attrition. But it looks like that’s what is has become, and the Pentagon made it so.
The ‘good news’ is that it does appear that the war in Iraq is unlike Vietnam in at least one key area. A study released September 14 by two groups, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), has concluded that the monthly cost to the U.S. for the war in Iraq is now greater than the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War. The report put costs in Iraq at $500 million a month more than in Vietnam, adjusted for inflation. The study calculates the cost of current military operations in Iraq at $5.6 billion every month.
So proponents of the WAT can honestly say that comparing Iraq with Vietnam is not fair in at least one major way, though I’m not so sure it will help their argument any.
Even, it appears, employing body count as a means of measuring success has been dusted off for use in the War Against Terror (WAT) - something the Pentagon said early on, and in no uncertain terms, it would not do. ("We don't do body counts” asserted CENTCOM General Tommy Franks, in response to a journalist’s question about the war in Afghanistan. You can’t get any clearer than that.)
The use of body count in Vietnam, a “metric” dreamed up by “whiz-kid” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, eventually became a weapon wrested from the hand of its owner and turned against him. With the advent of body counts as a yardstick, Vietnamese, both young and old, male and female became targets of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, particularly in free-fire (read: anything goes) zones. Anybody killed, either by accident or by design, became an insurgent for the purposes of cooking the books. Then, of course, came the phantom VC, where a body count of 10 or 100 in reality became 100 or 1,000 in after-action reports (the numbers were often inflated by commanders looking for promotions).
However, soon the “embellishment” got the best of them and reports of battlefield successes by senior commanders began to be used as ammunition against the White House by opponents of the war. After Vietnam, use of body count became verboten, not to be used even during the Gulf War (probably because coalition forces killed a disproportionately high number of Iraqi soldiers and the slaughter wouldn’t have made good PR).
But body count, it appears, is back with a vengeance.
According to the Washington Post September 19 (U.S. Claims Success in Iraq Despite Onslaught): “After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west. [Maj. Gen. Rick] Lynch, the [top U.S.] military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region. The fact that the number of insurgents killed or captured in the northern city of Tall Afar was roughly equal to advance estimates of their strength, he said, was proof that insurgents weren't simply escaping to fight another day -- and that U.S. forces were doing more than razing infrastructure. ‘Zarqawi is on the ropes,’ Lynch told reporters.”
Lynch’s remarks are reminiscent of promises made to the White House by senior commanders in the field, the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary McNamara, that once “the lines intersect" (i.e. the number of killed or captured VC meets, then exceeds the number of insurgents flowing across the border from the North) victory will be imminent. The promises proved to be hollow and victory was not to be, as it became evident that field commanders did not have a handle on the true number of insurgents coming down from the North or of those already in the South.
The Post article may be read to imply that the U.S. military has just lately begun to use body count as a yardstick in the WAT. However, according to Julian Barnes at USNews.com (7/18/05) “The body count has returned. It started slowly, but now it has become a regular occurrence. On June 21 [2005], 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.’”
Barnes’s litany hardly scratches the surface. Nearly every day, media outlets echo body count information released by the military that day or the day before. CNN, for example, said September 18 that according to the U.S. military “Coalition forces killed six insurgents in Northern Iraq…during raids on al Qaeda safe houses.” The day prior, CNN reported that “Two Taliban rebels were…killed during fighting in Kandahar province Thursday [September 15]…Eight suspected rebels were arrested…On Saturday [September 17], U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops caught 20 militants laying explosives along Kajaki Dam in southern Helmand province.”
Reports of battlefield gains may sound good to the average American, and that’s probably who they are being directed at. But as Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, comments in the Washington Post piece: "The question is, what does victory mean? It certainly isn't the number of people we kill or detain.” Cordesman maintains that the U.S. death and detention counts have “zero credibility," since U.S. forces provide little detail on those being killed and detained. As the Post item notes, “Since 2003, U.S. forces have detained 40,000 people, twice U.S. generals' highest public estimate of the number of fighters in the insurgency.”
Although they make good headlines, use of body counts fail as a key metric because they don’t stand on their own: Without knowledge of the ultimate size of the enemy force and of the potential pool from which the enemy may draw, body count doesn’t tell you much. So 100 are killed – what if the enemy’s total force is one million? So you take 50 out in a firefight, but the enemy acquires 100 new recruits the same day, are you better off? The Pentagon and White House certainly tried to make the people think so back in the day, and it appears they are trying to do the same thing now – making people think there is light at the end of the tunnel. But there is no light. Says Cordesman: "On a day-to-day basis, the overall level of security is obviously low. We can't secure the airport road, can't stop the incoming into the Green Zone, can't stop the killings and kidnappings.” Sounds an awful lot like Vietnam. (Indeed, as this was being written, eight American soldiers were killed in Iraq, bringing the total number of U.S. troops killed there to 1,907.)
It is important to note that use of body count as a metric is a key component of an attrition strategy that the U.S. supposedly proved doesn’t work (and it cost them 58,000+ personnel to do so). The war in Iraq was not supposed to be a war of attrition. But it looks like that’s what is has become, and the Pentagon made it so.
The ‘good news’ is that it does appear that the war in Iraq is unlike Vietnam in at least one key area. A study released September 14 by two groups, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), has concluded that the monthly cost to the U.S. for the war in Iraq is now greater than the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War. The report put costs in Iraq at $500 million a month more than in Vietnam, adjusted for inflation. The study calculates the cost of current military operations in Iraq at $5.6 billion every month.
So proponents of the WAT can honestly say that comparing Iraq with Vietnam is not fair in at least one major way, though I’m not so sure it will help their argument any.
posted by RG McGillivray at 2:46 p.m.
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