WASHINGTON – The U.S. Army announced today that it would no longer use enemy body counts as a measure of how successful it was in killing insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pentagon Chief-of-Staff General Edward Cornwallis said the move is part of an overall plan to make the U.S. military presence overseas more “politically correct,” and was sparked by a direct request from the Taliban that it was de-moralizing to their troops and supporters.
Cornwallis said that instead of counting enemy dead it would revert to the Revolutionary War practice of scalping.
“Scalping our enemies would help us in several areas” said Cornwallis. “First, it is a return to our roots as soldiers. Second, there will be no more fudging of how many people we kill. Now, if we drop a 50-lb. bomb on a building where we think someone is doing insurgent stuff, we take a guess at the body count. With our new plan, I want to see the proof in our soldiers’ hands. Or, hanging from their belts.”
The practice of the U.S. military keeping enemy body count figures has been controversial for many years, dating back to the Vietnam War. During that conflict the “ick-factor” that someone in our military was actually counting up dead bodies helped motivate many weak-stomached individuals to march and rally against the unpopular war.
Cornwallis also said that the shift in accounting for enemy losses would not affect the “over/under” betting pool that Pentagon staffers and news correspondents have that is based on the daily body count. “Betting on the over/under is an important game here in Washington. We’ll simply switch it from ‘body counts’ to ‘scalp counts,’” the general said.
