On Body Counts
Howdy,
I published a little something at the Bulwark on the pending Rafah offensive. It’s pretty good. I will publish the original piece this weekend. It’s about 4,000 words and provides more context about my thoughts on Israel’s war against Hamas.
There’s a lull in high-intensity operations as the IDF prepares to invade Rafah, which they should’ve done at the beginning of the war, but I digress. I don’t like writing about wars at the operational level while they are occurring. It’s bound to be wrong. The fog of war is a very real thing. It makes fools of us all (see Iraq and Afghanistan).
Nevertheless, the war about the war is centered on the lack of humanitarian assistance for Gazans, which I touch on here, and the “civilian casualties,” aka dead women and children. There are a lot of numbers being bandied about. Hamas claims everyone, but Ahmed over there, who stumbled upon an unclaimed AK-47, is an innocent civilian. The IDF rejoins with a body count of ~13-15K Hamas fighters.
Gun to my head who do I believe? The IDF. They’re a democratically elected state that is accountable to their people. They have an incentive to be truthful. That doesn’t mean they always will be. They’re the state, for goodness sake! Of course, they lie.
But here’s the thing: all these numbers are bullshit.
War isn’t a freakn’ math equation. It can never be immaculate. It’s not a video game. It is an inherently human endeavor filled with all the wonders and horrors of man: greed, vengeance, benevolence, kindness, and wrath.
That doesn’t mean you should throw down at a moment’s notice. (Although I must admit, I like to party. ) However, it does mean that deciding on a war’s effectiveness solely on body counts is a recipe for disaster. You would think that our horrible track record with body counts in Vietnam would ensure that we cast a wary eye toward such talk, but alas, here we are.
I’ve probably responded to a dozen mass casualty events, everything ranging from car bombs to suicide bombers. After the carnage is over (and who knows when that happens), higher headquarters always wanted a body count so they could plug them into their little spreadsheet of justice.
As a young officer, I tried to get the most accurate body count possible. How did I do that? I asked the Iraqis or the Afghans. They usually gave me some number, and I did an instant visual sanity check. If it made sense, that was the number.
There are no magical CSI investigators who come tumbling out of door #2 in war. All of these numbers are guesses—at most. Often, they are political or an attempt to bolster a career. Who doesn’t want to lead the raid that killed 1 million Talibs? This guy right here.
While killing the enemy is the firstborn son of war, it is not a military objective that should support the political objective. The IDF’s military objective is to destroy Hamas’ war machine and dislodge it from power, which nests under its political purpose, removing it from power. It’s a total war.
Anyone who looks you straight in the eye and tells you he knows for certain one way or another how this war will end is either a) an ideologue trying to whisper sweet nothings in your ear or b) knows nothing of war because they’ve never been anywhere near it — or C) all of the above.
Nobody knows if the IDF’s military strategy will work out. There’s no secret blueprint for fighting this type of war. However, what we do know is that solely keeping track of dead bodies is nothing but a talking point.
Be careful. Try not to kill innocent civilians. But war is killing. It will always be killing. You cannot make it something it can never be. Immaculate warfare is a myth invented by the makers of Call of Duty.
Until next time.
It's so refreshing to have the POV of someone who has actually been there/done that, rather than the bloviating fools whose sole experience of "combat" was defending their dissertation.
Agree with all the broad strokes of this piece, with the exception of one: that of the IDF are trying their damnedest to avoid killing civvies. From Phil Klay’s piece in The Atlantic this week: “…Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credibility.” (My own additional note is that during the “Shock and Awe” phase of the Iraq invasion we launched about 1,500 strikes over the first 96 hours—and that was with targets mostly in the open across a much wider AOR)
As a geospatial analyst who looks at satellite imagery for a living nowadays, I’d tend to agree with Klay that between the quantity of ordnance dropped into dense urban neighborhoods and what we end up seeing on the satellite imagery in the aftermath, the IDF is being *extremely* loose with their airstrike ROE, and these are the primary causes of civvies getting killed. It’s hard for me to contrast the most lenient Hamas/civilian body count ratios with the massive ordnance tallies and the overhead imagery of structural flattening without saying this is overkill on the part of the IDF.
That said, “never point out a problem without offering a solution,” so what would I do in Rafah as opposed to what was done in Gaza? This is going to draw out my bias as a former combat engineer, but I’d say use the D9 & Merkava instead of the F-16. Cordon off the area the way we did Fallujah and clear it block by block using D9 dozers and 120mm smoothbore shells instead of air strikes when contact is made on the ground. This way you have a firm set of eyes between target and response so as to only engage structures *confirmed* to have hostiles inside—unlike with intel-backed airstrikes, but you’re also less likely to do as much widespread neighborhood flattening as a result of limiting the response to contact to dozer-smashing structures or putting a tank shell through them (much smaller explosive yield than a 200 or 500-lb bomb. Will this prevent all civvies from dying? No. Will it drastically improve the margins? Yes, in my opinion. Just my $0.02 on Rafah vs Gaza and what tactics might be worth changing. Thanks for your writings as always Will.