US Army returns to "Body Count" strategy with tragic results
Here's an interesting article in from Salon that looks at how the US Army is returning to the "Body Count" strategy that pretty much failed in Vietnam.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/09/snipers/
Basically, the body count strategy is the idea that frontline units, especially snipers, must justify battlefield success based on a quota of how many insurgents they kill. While tracking enemy casualties is an effective way to track how a war is progressing in a conventional conflict, it's at best a nebulous way to keep score in a guerilla conflict. My dad, a Vietnam vet, used to joke that Army math is 2 water buffalo + 20 chickens + 1 farmer caught in the crossfire = 22 KIA Viet Cong.
It seems littl has changed since the Army returned to body count quotas in Iraq. Some of the top US Army snipers have been recently convicted of murdering innocent civilians and placing "drop" weapons to make it seem like the civilians were actually combatants.
But this isn't the most disturbing part. The high Army brass pushed harder and harder on frontline snipers to make quota, and looked the other way as long as sniper units seemed to be performing. Oh, and the convicted snipers did less than a year in prison for first degree murder and are still in active service. The commanding sergeant only lost one stripe and is still an NCO.
BTW, I think the article does do a fair job of describing the extremely dangerous and hellish conditions snipers must endure in Iraq. But at the same time, it's obvious that the current system is rife with abuse and that the top brass looked the other way as innocents were being murdered.
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Originally Posted by Chaigidel
. Interesting article. Are these really orders from above? I've never heard of this before. Are there any other sources for this? If this is true i am genuinely shocked and saddened.
