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December 02, 2003

Body Count Math

One of the hardest things young officers learn to do is assemble spot reports. In the middle of a battle, platoon leaders are receiving reports from the subordinates describing what each of them is seeing. Because there is always overlap, this means the officer has to assess what he's really facing. If your wingman says he sees two enemy tanks, your platoon sergeant says he sees three, and your platoon sergeant's wingman says he sees five, how many tanks are you actually facing: two, three, five, ten, more? Platoon leaders generally discover that they never know precisely what they're facing. All they can do is give estimates based on the reports they're given and tempered by their experience. This continues at the company, battalion, brigade, and division level. No matter how good the spot reports are, there is always a level of uncertainty in the reports you receive.

This is even worse when it comes to counting casualties. As a rule, soldiers are convinced that every shot they fire hits and kills its target. The spot reports that come in, therefore, are loaded with kills. I've been in (training) battles in which my platoon has told me they killed a dozen enemy vehicles when we were only facing four. And vehicles are generally easier to assess than personnel. Who knows how many people you actually killed or wounded when you spray a concentration of enemy infantry with machinegun fire? Tankers, as a rule, simply report that they engaged and destroy a squad or a platoon of dismounts and continue looking for targets. It's an easy report, but tankers know that it doesn't actually mean that there's a dead squad or platoon lined up on the ground now. It's just shorthand, because it's too hard to really count how many dismounts you're facing or how many you killed, and it really doesn't matter anyhow. If I know I'm facing a squad-sized element, that's really all the information I need to fight them. But that can lead to reporting difficulties after the battle, if someone up the chain takes the reports at face value.

One would think the Army had learned a few lessons from Vietnam; actually, I know it has, because I've seen the results. For that matter, I ought to know better than to jump on the first report and assume it's accurate. But it appears that we both jumped to some conclusions upon hearing about Sunday's battle. Reports from the Iraqis on the scene differ dramatically from the official account. While there's no surprise that reports would vary, it is virtually impossible to reconcile the two accounts. Further, we are now being told that the body count (a bad idea to begin with, see Vietnam above) is based on estimates, not a search of the battlefield. And the explanation by General Kimmitt that the Iraqis dragged the bodies away doesn't pass the laugh test; our reports of the battle were that we smoked the enemy. A broken enemy doesn't stick around to clear the battlefield. If we did defeat an ambush, and that's certainly likely, than the enemy remnants almost certainly were routed from the field. It's certainly possible we might have missed a few bodies, but the difference between the reported 54 and the observed eight is far too high.

The bottom line for the battle is simple: we need more information before we'll have an idea of what really happened. There was clearly some kind of fight. I'm less willing than Jim to believe that it was a massacre (correction: I misread Jim's post; he's arguing against the massacre hypothesis), but there are a lot of unanswered questions here.

The bottom line for Iraq is worse. It appears that someone decided to try and use the battle as good PR, which is never a good idea. If you're doing well, the facts will come out to that effect anyhow. If you try to pump up a bad situation, or make something into more than it is, you'll just hurt your cause in the long run. As for the bodies, that just makes me wonder if we aren't taking a bad step towards Vietnamizing this war. While I firmly believe that we need to eliminate those who seek to undermine the work we've done in Iraq, adding up body counts isn't going to help our cause.

We don't yet know what happened in Iraq. But I believe that the Army's decision to hype the battle may prove to be a major error when all the facts come out. Generals should stick to winning the war on the battlefield, and not worry so much about public relations.

Kudos to Gary Farber for pointing out what I knew but forgot: the first report is almost always wrong.