This is coolbert: The body count. This topic was touched upon this morning on National Public Radio [NPR]. This is obviously in response to the latest reports out of Iraq, where the military is now announcing body counts of jihadis killed in combat with U.S. forces. This announcing of body count was not a policy pursued prior to this point. Now it is. The intention seems to be to satisfy the home public in the U.S. that progress is made in fighting the jihadi uprising, and that the jihadis are not succeeding.

Body counts were an intrinsic part of the Vietnam War. It seems that the American public has a desire to have some sort of tangible numbers presented to it as demonstrable proof of "results". Much as in the business world. Greater net, greater profits, greater sales, greater shipments per month, etc. American society seems to be obsessed with numbers and numbers showing "results". Results that demonstrate that progress being made and a positive outcome is guaranteed. If a positive result is not obtained from body count, then the American public is not convinced that results favorable to the "cause" are being obtained. The "cause" is then not worth it. Sort of like a sporting event. The crowd constantly wants to know what the score is and how many points are we ahead, what the home team is doing from quarter to quarter, etc. If the body count is in your favor, all is well, if it is not in your favor, well, look out, the American public is not happy.

The body count craze seems to be the idea of the Secretary of
Defense at the time, R.S. [Strange] Mc Namara. Robert was a business "captain of industry", head of either Ford Motors or GMC, and was a statistics, charts, and report man. Always wanted to have figures and such as a managerial tool to evaluate performance and "progress". Not only for body counts, but in all things.

And during the Vietnam War, allegations were made that body counts of enemy dead on the battlefield were inflated and untrue. What is the truth behind this accusation? Well, I actually talked to an infantry lieutenant who was one of the persons whose duty it was to survey the battlefield after a firefight, and attempt to determine the number of enemy killed. His instructions were to count whole bodies of course, and also count as a "kill" separate major body parts such as a hand, a foot, a major limb, etc., as single kills too. So if your found a head, a foot, a hand and a leg all in different spots, this would counts as four separate enemy dead. I then asked the question, "how do you know this is not the parts from the same person, who was blown to bits. You are counting the same person as four separate kills?". Well, the answer was that you did not know. But you had to have some sort of mechanism and protocol, and this was the instructions they were given. Better something than nothing.

coolbert.