Victor Hanson thinks we should give the numbers, as he states in this interview with Hugh Hewitt:
HH: ... I’m wondering what is your belief about the Pentagon policy of not revealing the number of dead and wounded among the enemy?
VDH: I think it’s a great mistake, and you and I both know why they don’t. It’s the reaction to Vietnam when we had the search and destroy missions, where success was predicated on body counts. But in every other war that we’ve fought, even when fronts changed hands and territory wasn’t the only litmus test for success, we have tried to give some estimations of the body counts. And we have this mystique about al Qaeda and Islamicists in general that there’s this endless supply of people who want to blow themselves up, or die before our army, and there’s not. There wasn’t in World War II with Japanese kamikazes. They had to be drugged or made to get drunk, or they were shanghaied out of university. Anybody who was an English major was put in a plane. There’s always a finite supply of that, and I’d like to see when they say that the incidents are going down, one of the reasons is that we don’t even talk about, it’s not just that Sunni sheiks have gone over to our side, but we’ve killed a lot of people, and people don’t want to die, most people don’t.
HH: What about the argument from some in the Pentagon that if a private finds out that we’re releasing these body counts, he’ll think the metric of a success are the number killed. And it is not necessarily that at all, if he starts killing civilians.
VDH: Yeah, well, I think that’s what good officers are for, and I think you and I, and most people have a lot of confidence in American officers in general, and specifically the caliber of officers that are in Iraq right now. I think everybody who’s for the war or against the war agrees on one thing. This is the finest American army that we’ve fielded in the history of this country.
I'm on record as worrying that if we judge the war by body counts, any running Iraq will be considered a jihadi; and any Iraqi standing still will be considered a well disciplined jihadi. Our body count will go higher but it won't count enemies alone.
I think that at least in part, Hanson is right that our troop leadership is professional enough to guard against this tendency to just kill so that reports clearly show "victory."
But I think Hanson is wrong to advocate a body count approach to scoring the war. I know that we are killing many more enemies than we lose. I know we are far more effective. Do Americans in general not know this? That would be an interesting poll to run. Ask our people, do you think that the enemy kills more of our troops than we kill of them? Do we kill five times as many? Ten times? Twenty times?
But recall when our leaders have announced total kills. Our press will idiotically note that according to our kill numbers, we should have eliminated the enemy based on known numbers given as enemy strength. The press portrays the normal recruiting and replacement that our enemy does with some magical "regenerating" capacity. The press will never also note our uncanny ability to replace our losses with ease. And given the press reports that complain of repeated tours of duty in Iraq, our troops clearly aren't being decimated the way the enemy is. Just how many of the enemy are on a second or third "tour?" (Yes, I know they don't do tours, but you get my point.)
And ultimately, the enemy only has to run up casualty numbers by going after easy targets of civilians to trump any numbers we display. And given that our enemies fight in civilian clothing, even killing more of the enemy will appear as more civilian deaths, at least in part.
Counter-insurgency isn't won by body counts. If our public thinks we aren't killing the enemy effectively, we must counter that belief in a way other than using box scores of killed enemies.
