BY body count, I mean the number of people killed, wounded, captured and surrendered that has been exploited by misguided politicians, the police and military and some irresponsible members of the media to measure the success of the government’s intensified antidrug campaign.
In fact, there are too many tangible and intangible variables that cannot be measured by way of a mathematical quantification, like lost morale and ethics; families destroyed; how crimes are committed; how bad prisons breed crimes; greedy and ambitious politicians resorting to criminal activities; and the damage to the country’s social, moral and ethical foundation, to cite only a few.
Besides, a bunch of anti-Duterte group has already come up with an unqualified generalization of people killed in the antidrug war and labeled them as victims of “extra-judicial killings”, a clever propaganda hyperbole designed to erode President Duterte’s success in regaining the streets from drug lords, pushers and addicts.
Take the experience of Vietnam when some misguided politicians and military generals resorted to body count (number of enemies killed) that merely misled them into believing that the US was winning the war in Vietnam.
“Body count. That’s one of the more grisly aspects of the Vietnam War that the US military can’t seem to shed, no matter how hard it tries,” said the late Harry G. Summers Jr., the respected military specialist who wrote extensively about the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the Persian Gulf, has emphatically stated “that as a Vietnam veteran, he abhors body counts as a measure of military success, that he thinks such statistics are not only meaningless but misleading and that body counts can push junior commanders into a numbers game that compromises their integrity.”
“Military activity is never directed against material force alone,” emphasized Von Clausewitz, the great war strategist. “‘It is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life.’ The difficulty for reporters attempting to discern how the Persian Gulf campaign is progressing is that such moral values can only be perceived by the inner eye, which differs in each person….”
A war of attrition expert recalled that “General Westmoreland of the US rallied to turn the tide and stem the losses suffered in the South by making US involvement more open-ended. He reasoned that US military strength existed primarily in its offensive capabilities because of the nature of US military schooling. His plan was to ‘seize the initiative’ to destroy guerrilla and organized forces of the North [read: search and destroy]. This phase of engagement would require the continued commitment of the US [keep giving us money, soldiers and weapons] and would end when the enemy was thrown on the defensive, exhausted, low on resources and unable to launch, insurgent or organized attacks. [Read: Go on the offense by seeking out enemy forces within South Vietnam, but don’t actually invade North Vietnam.]
“Essentially, Westmoreland reasoned that US superiority in warfare technology and resources would eliminate more bodies than the North could replace. Part of his attrition strategy did also include recruitment strengthening in the South [primarily to discount another body for the North]. American soldiers and technology would advance to wipe out the bulk of the North Vietnamese Army’s [NVA] organized forces and ARVN would be relegated to taking over defensive roles in the South and bolstering recruitment. Attrition was to be supported with heavy firepower and bombing that would, in theory, suppress enemy safeties and hiding spots.
“Ultimately, body counts proved to be problematic because of easy manipulation. Leadership would sometimes instruct forces to add innocents and civilians to the days body count. Pure inflating of the numbers reported also occurred. Morevoer, the North was able to control the rate at which they suffered losses by avoiding large scale confrontation by organized forces [which is what the US army excelled at].”
Body count had its origin from Baron Antoine Henri Jomini, a Napoleonic military strategist who theorized that war could best be understood in terms of mathematics, in terms of things that can be counted.
A military expert said: “The quintessential Jominians during the Vietnam War were Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and his coterie of ‘whiz kid’ program analysis number-crunchers, most of whom had probably never heard of Jomini. But they surely embraced his belief that war could be mathematically measured, codified and computerized. And in their quest for numbers to prove we were winning, the body-count syndrome was born.”
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com