WaPo: Enemy body counts in Vietraq

The Washington Post is hard to come by in Baton Rouge, so I don't know how they slugged this story in the print edition, but the online headline hits the administration pretty hard.

Reporter Bradley Graham examines the growing frequency with which the military has been releasing the numbers of dead enemy bodies as a measure of success against the Iraqi insurgency. He wastes no time placing this practice in the context of Vietnam.

The revival of body counts, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership. Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said they knew of no written directive detailing the circumstances under which such figures should be released or the steps that should be taken to ensure accuracy.

Rather than an official policy, the practice appears to be taking place on an ad hoc basis, the Post reports.

Privately, several uniformed military and civilian defense officials expressed concern that the pendulum may have swung too far, with body counts now creeping into too many news releases from Iraq and Afghanistan. They also questioned the effectiveness of citing such figures in conflicts where the enemy has shown itself capable of rapidly replacing dead fighters and where commanders acknowledge great uncertainty about the total size of the enemy force.

The story also points out the main problem with body counts as metric in this kind of conflict. When the enemy does not wear a uniform and does not, as a practice, fight in a recognizable military formation, it is difficult to distinguish dead insurgents from dead civilians. Furthermore, if body counts become accepted as an informal measure of success, the practice becomes vulnerable to falsification.

To keep body counts from becoming a de facto metric of progress against the insurgency really falls to the news media. They must resist the temptation to report this information as though it means more than it does.