Assessing War Damage Not Just Science
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A week after the bombing in Afghanistan started, the American people want to know what it has achieved. The lesson of history is this: They'll have to wait. And the first readings will be exaggerated.
Hours into the campaign, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "It looks to be at this early juncture successful."
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia claimed civilian deaths by the dozens, up to 200 people by Friday, but the numbers could not be readily confirmed, as was their report of having downed a U.S. aircraft _ apparently an unmanned spy plane.
Assessing war damage is an imprecise task, dependent on information that usually changes upon closer inspection. And when the fighting stops, the reports are often rewritten in a way that gives the impression that the military has exaggerated its claims of combat success.
"This cycle has bordered on the hilarious over the last 10 years," says Anthony Cordesman, a strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, a Washington think tank.
Early in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Army claimed the Patriot missile, used to intercept Iraqi Scud missiles, had success rates of 80 percent in Saudi Arabia and 50 percent in Israel. Those claims were later scaled back to 70 percent and 40 percent, which some still consider overblown.
After the NATO air campaign in Kosovo, an Air Force damage assessment team scouring the Serbian province found far less destruction than had been initially reported. Instead of 250 armored personnel carriers, 153 were hit. And NATO planes struck 93 tanks _ not 100.
The figures were revised after it was revealed that some targets had been hit several times, or were actually decoys planted by Serb forces.
Damage reports are useful mainly to war planners, though the media and the American public clamor for them, too.
But they are "only one piece of the military equation," says Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution.
In its anti-terror campaign, the United States is marshaling diplomatic, economic, legal and military resources in an attempt to wipe out the terrorist network of Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in last month's attacks in New York and Washington.
Three days after the United States began launching bombs and missiles into Afghanistan, the Pentagon showed off the first before-and-after photographs of targets struck.
The images were familiar from past conflicts: dark, grainy and shot from high in the sky, forcing people to squint to make out the differences.
And as shown by revised damage reports from the NATO air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the decade-old Gulf War, things often look a lot worse initially than they do later on.
Some doubt the military would deliberately misinform the public.
"The military does not get up and provide intentionally false information," said Jay Farrar, a former Marine colonel and military analyst at CSIS. "What they give is the best analysis they have at the time they're providing it."
But damage reports should be viewed with a "healthy amount of skepticism," said Barry Zorthian, the chief U.S. spokesman in Saigon during the Vietnam War.
"I don't know that it's deliberately overstated; I would think not," he said. "But the effort to assess that damage accurately is very difficult."
Overhead photography and reporting from the ground are among the sources used to assess war damage. Weather and terrain can complicate the task, and targets such as vehicles and machinery can be quickly repaired _ making the whole process a bit chancy.
"All of these factors make this an art form, not a science," said Cordesman.
Even while discussing damage in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other military officials have urged caution about the early damage reports.
Soon after the first bombs hit Afghan targets, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed that the offensive involves more than military firepower.
"In this kind of warfare, against this kind of enemy, the true measure of effectiveness, in my opinion, will not necessarily be in numerical term," he said.
Rumsfeld backed him up, saying people shouldn't get the "mistaken understanding" that cruise missiles alone will put a stop to global terrorism.
"It's going to be a range of things that will do that," he said.
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