I guess your right, and that a body count could be a useful measure - but only if it is appropriate to assessing the effectiveness of any strategy, not as a strategy (or even a tactic) unto itself.
I also suspect that any reporting of eny killed will be a near impossible task. Unless your taking the ground after a conflict your unlikely to be able to accurately assess the damage you've inflicted - I think you've highlighted the issues yourself on this forum with regards to Brit actions in Helmand to this end. Additionally, even if you do dominate the battlefield post-contact, their can be massive amounts of warped feedback influencing the statistics (who was enemy, who was carrying a weapon, the need to best a sister company, etc etc).
I distrust the western militaries as a whole (yep, massive generalisation alert!) being able to employ a body count statistic as an effective tool in pursuit of strategis assessment. I fear, as I've outlined elsewhere, that many of today's coalition forces are too orientated topwards minimising their own losses and any data proving that they are killing the eny would only serve to spt/ reinforce current tactics that may inflict loss, but don't work towards a sustainable objective . It may be my own bias but I don't trust tools as easily blinding and misleading as statistics without substantial qualification. That, and I'm a former humanities student who generally distrusts the numbers people
In short Wilf, I agree that there is nothing wrong with the body count as a tool assessing one's strategy in theory, but in practise I oppose it. Knowledge of both FF and enemy forces in any conflict is bound to be imperfect, so we are better off embracing that imperfection than trying to supplant it withthe inevitable, omnipotent excel spreadsheet.
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