Why Body Counts Are a Bad Metric for Judging Islamic State Fight
Why Body Counts Are a Bad Metric for Judging Islamic State Fight by Terry Atlas, Bloomberg
After extremists’ latest advances in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. is falling back on an old and discredited metric — estimated enemy body counts — to show it isn’t losing the war against Islamic State.
Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, filling in at a Paris conference this week after his boss John Kerry broke his leg in a bicycling accident, said the U.S.-led coalition has killed about 10,000 Islamic State fighters since its campaign against the group began 10 months ago.
U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and independent analysts questioned the accuracy and value of the number. It’s at best a rough estimate relying on limited intelligence capabilities and a poor measure of how the war is going because the militant group appears to be able to replace its losses with new recruits, they said…
