Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
It maybe needs clarification that it is not an issue of seeking out the enemy and having more contacts but rather making each contact more telling in terms of the ratio of kills to the number of enemy contacted.

In Rhodesia the average kill rate among the security forces was 18.5% as compared to the fire force kill rate of 80-odd-% (this compared to the Brit SAS kill rate in Malaya of 13%)
On the other hand Rhodesia also illustrates what critics of body-count metrics in COIN argue, namely that killing may not be a very effective measure of progress towards victory. In the end, the insurgency in Rhodesia was successful--perhaps not on the battlefield, but rather in the political and diplomatic arena where it really counted.