James Willbanks, Joe Galloway and others in “Unfinished Business”

The problem with the war, as it often is, are the metrics. It is a situation where if you can't count what's important, you make what you can count important. So, in this particular case what you could count was dead enemy bodies.

You don't get details with a body count, you get numbers. And the numbers are lies - most of 'em. If body count is your success mark, then you're pushing otherwise honorable men, warriors, to become liars.

If body count is the measure of success, then there's a tendency to count every body as an enemy soldier. There's a tendency to want to pile up dead bodies, and perhaps to use less discriminate firepower than you otherwise might in order to achieve the result that you're charged with trying to obtain