Posted by Bayonet Brant
Once you start counting something, the reporting of that count becomes a self-licking ice cream cone, and without a clear understanding of why you counted it in the first place (throughout the command) you're counting just because you always counted, and then it becomes some form or mis-construed performance metric or a continual quest to outdo the old record, or some other useless mutated bit of BS.
I'm skeptical of the value of doing this, and believe it will lead to inappropriate behavior. You mentioned the body counts in Malaya and Cyprus, but was the so what of them? How did they contribute to a victory? Maybe it was just something the commander wanted so he could send apparently good news back to his political leadership? Of course anytime a western force engages irregulars in a developing nation the body count ratio is in our favor, but we don't always win.

Count the bodies, we're going to do it anyway, but the numbers are just data, and they can and should be interpreted in different ways. If the enemy body count continues to raise you may interpret it as the enemy is more effective at mobilizing the populace to fight us, or on the other hand the remaining leadership is less effective, and there are numerous of other interpretations that may or may not be relevant, so the question comes back to why is it a useful metric for anything other than to support information operations (they killed a 100 of us, but we killed a thousand of them; therefore, we're winning). Wrong headed thinking IMO, but you have to feed the American and British audience something to keep their support.

In WWII did we keep body counts or estimates of KIA? Kind hard to do a body count after you carpet bomb a few cities that are in enemy territory unless they're kind enough to publish the numbers. Better indicators of success may have been the use of child soldiers, during the end of WWII the Germans were throwing younger teenagers into the fight, which probably indicated that less men of fighting age were available, presumably due to casualties.

While the data could be useful, I strongly believe it will be misinterpreted and may drive some commanders to conduct kinetic operations when they're not appropriate to ensure their stats look as good at the commanders in the other AOs, even though he doesn't have significant numbers in his battlespace. We all seen what happens then, everyone is a bad guy after they're dead.

I support the argument that the metric isn't overly useful and potentially very harmful due to Western Officers being competitive. Nothing wrong with competition, but this competition could actually result in a loss.