He should rightly know. Likely one of the reasons he's leaving his post.
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| Terror Networks |
| Pentagon Says U.S. has Killed Thousands of IS Jihadists |
| 2015-01-24 |
| [AnNahar] The United States believes it has killed about 6,000 jihadists in its air strikes against the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... group, defense officials said Thursday. Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, however, warned against resorting to "body counts" to measure progress in the war. The estimate of how many IS fighters had been taken out by U.S.-led air raids was first cited by Washington's ambassador to Iraq, Stuart Jones, in an interview aired Thursday by Al-Arabia television. U.S. defense officials reluctantly confirmed the figure but insisted the military was not placing a priority on the measurement, which carried uncomfortable echoes from the Vietnam conflict -- when American commanders cited daily "body counts" to convey progress in the war. There was no independent confirmation of the casualty estimate and it remains unclear how many civilians might have been inadvertently killed in the strikes. But if accurate, it would suggest the coalition has inflicted astounding damage on the IS group since the air strikes began in Iraq on August 8 and in Syria on September 23. The casualty toll would mean bombing raids wiped out roughly 20-30 percent of the IS group's fighting force, which is estimated at between 20,000 to 31,500 fighters, according to the Central Intelligence Agency's estimates released last year. Hagel told a news conference he could not confirm the 6,000 corpse count but said "thousands" of IS fighters had been killed in U.S.-led bombing raids. "We do know that thousands of ISIL fighters have been killed, and we do know that some of ISIL's leadership have been killed," he said. However, if you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning... Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who still carries shrapnel fragments in his chest from his war wounds, said the number of IS holy warriors killed was not a useful gauge for assessing the effect of the air campaign. "I was in a war where there was a lot of body counts every day. And we lost that war," he said. Other indicators showed that the IS was on the defensive and under pressure, Hagel said, including signs the jihadists were having trouble recruiting, keeping supply routes open and maintaining communications on the battlefield. "These are the metrics you look at as to how much progress you're making in a war," he added. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #10 Nice to see high body counts are back en vogue. If these are the numbers el prez is getting, no wonder he thinks highly of the situation. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2015-01-24 16:25 |
| #9 Are we stacking them up faster than they could stack themselves? Screw it. Get out and give the jooooos the Pershing Data. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2015-01-24 14:35 |
| #8 Numma 7 obviously referring to what I call 'wars within wars.' A dynamic for which I have absolute and unequivocal loathing. Very accurate catch P2k. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-01-24 11:41 |
| #7 Don't forget the 'institutional' inter-service game of my boys killed more of the bad guys than your boys and thus I should get more funding. The game of 'mine is bigger than yours' has been going on forever. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-01-24 10:40 |
| #6 For IS its war was lost in Iraq once it began to gather its troops en masse. |
| Posted by: Ulique Pelosi8805 2015-01-24 10:06 |
| #5 Good point Ulu, but I think we must be careful to differentiate between the destruction of combat units and the selective media reporting of 'eaches.' |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-01-24 08:36 |
| #4 It's bunch of BS. In wars of attrition you need some measure of progress. The one measure least subject to distortion is body counts. Wars of maneuver measure progress via the amount territory taken. In a war of attrition, if you're not stacking up enemy dead, you need to step it up. That's why the military does body counts, even if it doesn't release them to the press. |
| Posted by: Crating Uluting3408 2015-01-24 08:30 |
| #3 g(r)om, they may be counting bunnies and kitties to make the number look higher. When the count for HR purposes those will be ignored. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2015-01-24 08:23 |
| #2 Though with due concern for "minimizing civilian casualties", one presumes? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-01-24 06:24 |
| #1 He should rightly know. Likely one of the reasons he's leaving his post. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-01-24 06:21 |