Defense Dept. rhetoric reflects war frustrations.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

The Pentagon has launched yet another "information warfare" offensive that aims to reshape how Americans and the world perceive the ongoing war in Iraq.

The results have been confusing, at best.

A major target of this latest information campaign is, oddly enough, one of the biggest truisms of warfare:

"Know thy enemy."

Defense officials in fact know so little about the insurgency American troops are combating in Iraq they decided that detailed information about the enemy, such as its strength and capabilities, is not all that important to winning the war.

"Nobody's maintaining a count of the size of the insurgency or the numbers that we're capturing because, as we've discussed from here and elsewhere--before Congress--it's not a metric that has a lot of meaning by itself," said Larry DiRita, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

And even if those numbers mattered, DiRita continued, obtaining accurate information would be a "difficult thing to do" and would not be worth the effort.

DiRita was responding to a reporter's question about retired Gen. Jack Keane's account following a recent trip to Iraq. The former vice chief of staff of the Army reported that U.S. forces had either captured or killed some 50,000 insurgents so far this year.

The Defense Department, DiRita stressed, does not necessarily dispute Keane's numbers, but neither does it compile its own figures.

"It's an interesting thing to understand, you know, what's the size of the adversary that we're facing," DiRita said. "And the estimates have ranged from a few thousand to many tens of thousands ... It's not a number that we do track ... It's a number that we aren't interested in."

Most military experts agree that enemy body counts are not a useful means to measure success, as the Vietnam War proved.

But not knowing the size and overall strength of the opposing three seems counterintuitive when one considers that the military spends billions of dollars on battlefield intelligence programs and officials have lectured for years that the key to winning is to "get inside the enemy's decision cycle."

Victory in Iraq recently has been redefined as achieving stability and security. What that really means, however, is in the eye of the beholder. "We'll know it when we see it," said Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations on the Joint Staff.

Iraq's insurgency is so amorphous and incongruent that it's no wonder the U.S. is having problems figuring it...