Let Us See the Other Side of the War Ledger

I have expressed on this blog that a key demand I have of my government these days is dead terrorists. Based on some of the better non-MSM reporting, I have some confidence that the government is delivering. Frankly though, I didn't think it through to the obvious conclusion...we need body counts. Elsewhere, some have drawn that conclusion and boldly stated it. We need to know how many terrorists we are killing. Now, I understand the military's and the administration's reluctance to get into this type of reporting. Tallying body counts became a false scorecard during the Vietnam war and morphed into a perverse metric that took on a life of it own. Still, in today's information based society, can't we intelligently craft a way to convey metrics along with context in a way that avoids the mistakes of the past? It doesn't have to be a crude number. Can't we say, very simply, today the Marines made dead 50 guys crossing the Syrian border, who were a mix of Jordanians, Egyptians and Pakis and they all had al-Qaeda explosives manuals and IED components? Can't that then be 50 in the plus column of "Very Highly Likely AQ Terrorists Killed"? Americans are thoroughly capable of assessing the tradeoffs of US casualties against what those costs are getting us in return. Let us do the CBA. Currently though we don't have the necessary information.

(HT: Say Anything)