Keying off Shawn’s previous post…if the DOD figures are accurate this means:
- In about two years, we have killed 45,000 insurgents from a force of around 25,000.
- This is around 100% losses a year
- This means the insurgents had to completely recruit an entire new force every year for the last two years
- Or maybe we just shot everyone twice.
- It is clear the claimed kills are way too high, or the claimed strength is too low, or a little bit of both
- We are getting three kills per sortie.
- Now, I have not done an analysis of kills per sorties in other insurgencies (and this would be useful to do), but I am pretty certain that this is unusually high.
- We are killing almost a 1,000 insurgents (not in uniform) for every civilian we are killing.
- Even if I use the Airwars figure of 1,568 civilians killed, this is 29 insurgents for every civilian killed.
- Again, I have not an analysis of insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (and this would be useful to do), but these rates seem unusually low.
It appears that there are some bad estimates being made here. Nothing wrong with doing an estimate, but something is very wrong if you are doing estimates that are significantly off. Some of these appear to be off.
This is, of course, a problem we encountered with Iraq and Afghanistan and is discussed to some extent in my book America’s Modern Wars. It was also a problem with the Soviet Army in World War II, and is something I discuss in some depth in my Kursk book.
It would be useful to develop a set of benchmarks from past wars looking at insurgents killed per sorties, insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (an other types of operations), insurgents killed compared to force strength, and so forth.