…is just as stupid a policy in warfighting as it is in policing schoolchildren. Cory Dauber has a good post on the obsession that the media has with daily casualty rates.

Given the caveats that every casualty is a tragic loss, what would be less than one loss a day? The return of the zero casualty policy of the Clinton years — which I thought had been discredited both as something which distorted mission planning and which was ultimately unworkable in a war of wills with terrorists still thinking of Lebanon and Somalia as models for American behavior. So it is worth asking again — did September 11th change our way of thinking about the risks we face and the way we will face them, or not?

Yes. The goal is not to have zero casualties–it’s to win the war. Obviously we want to minimize casualties within the constraints of that goal, and don’t want needless ones, but there’s no right answer to how many there should be, and to focus on that is to lose focus on the real objective.

We need some perspective here. We still lost more men in the first hour of the Normandy landing than we’ve lost since we first went into Iraq, and this notion that the fact that we’ve now lost more soldiers since the end of major combat operations than during the the removal of the government has any significance is simply bizarre numerology.

All that means is that we had amazingly low casualties during that phase, not that the current ones are somehow “too high.”