Body Counts: Damned if They Do

Here's an article about a unique and daunting rhetorical challenge faced by military forces on the ground today: should they release numbers of enemy dead after an engagement?

The context for this is a bit ironic and somewhat involved. In Vietnam the fighting was less over ground than it was for "metrics." The belief was if we killed a certain number, destroyed enough weapons, captured enough of their food stores, and so on and so on, the enemy would no longer be able to sustain its fighting effort and would have to capitulate (or at least quit fighting). War by statistical calculation, so to speak. The pressure to up the body count produced a pressure to interpret dead bodies as enemy dead, inflating the statistics to meaninglessness, and it was also argued by critics of the war and critics of the military that it dehumanized the enemy.

Part of the effort to turn away from Vietnam included a rejection, complete and total, of body counts of enemy dead, certainly as a way of telling the public how a battle had gone.

There were two problems with that. The first was that the absolute and complete refusal to issue any count of enemy dead in Desert Storm was not read as a reaction to Vietnam, as an effort to win by winning, not through statistics, and to treat the dead as dead human beings and not as "metrics," it was treated by critics of the military as -- wait for it -- an effort to dehumanize the dead by, essentially, "disappearing" them. (Hey -- I just report this stuff.)

The other problem is that while relying on enemy body counts as a metric for victory might be a bad idea, completely refusing to ever refer to enemy dead isn't necessarily a great rhetorical choice either. Since the military has to announce precise figures for US and allied dead and wounded, you consistently have the sense created of battles where Americans are wounded and killed and . . . what? There's no information coming from the other side, so there's no way for the American people to gauge whether battles are even balanced, much less lop-sided, especially in situations where, once again, the goal is not moving forward and taking territory.

As long as the information is given for reasons of context, and not solely as a "score card" it can be very, very useful.

Of course, there are downsides. One, as the article mentions, is that as soon as it's claimed that enemy fighters have been killed, someone will pipe up and claim that at least some of those dead were civilians. But of course that was happening without the military issuing specific numbers.

Second is this: it's been noted repeatedly that even under fire not only the enemy but just local townspeople will retrieve the bodies of the fallen so that after a firefight -- even when American forces have seen enemy fighters go down -- the area is completely cleared of bodies by the time the shooting stops.

Yet repeatedly when Americans have claimed certain numbers in ground combat, you read something like this in the press:

That policy appeared to shift with the assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November, an operation considered crucial at the time to denying safe havens to enemy fighters. U.S. military officials reported 1,200 to 1,600 enemy fighters killed, although reporters on the scene noted far fewer corpses were found by Marines after the fighting. (My emph.)

I remember during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, the Pentagon spokespeople repeatedly said they were reluctant to give a figure on enemy dead because many of the dead were being killed when bombs were dropped on deep tunnels and caves, making it hard to give a specific estimate. (In other words the bodies would never be found to be counted.) As soon as they were coaxed into giving a number, reporters on the scene began reporting that the bodies they were finding didn't come close to matching what the Pentagon was saying and maybe this wasn't quite the success we'd been led to believe.

At the end of the day, though, those rhetorical challenges aren't nearly as great as those that come from simply refusing to give any numbers at all.

Comments

[rebecca]

In one of those "man behind the curtain" posts that I love to read about concerning the press, Doug Harper of Done With Mirrors (he's a copy editor at a PA newspaper) says that even last week the wire services were starting to move stories about the 2000th death in Iraq. Doug expects lots of "Bush Lied, They Died" commentary, and a check of the articles, pictures and graphs being sent out are "(a)ll about death, loss, funerals, mourning." http://vernondent.blogspot.com/2005/10/get-ready-for-it.html

[rebecca]

Yikes! There's more. Stephen Spruiell of NRO's media blog says "Brace yourselves. It's about to get really stupid." Cindy Sheehan chaining herself to the WH fence is a feature, plus Ralph Peter's comments. http://media.nationalreview.com/080547.asp

[rebecca]

Yikes! There's more. Stephen Spruiell of NRO's media blog says "Brace yourselves. It's about to get really stupid." Cindy Sheehan chaining herself to the WH fence is a feature, plus Ralph Peter's comments. http://media.nationalreview.com/080547.asp