Originally posted by _Schadenfreude_
How long is the current TOD in Iraq? Local US commanders are saying that frequency of contacts with insurgents are on the decrease but it's hard to get a feel for what it's actually like.
Command Hq's tend in my experience to be wildly optimistic at all times even when everything is going to hell in a handcart around them.
Nasty dangerous little war by the looks of it...
I saw two articles on this in the South China Morning Post last week - one was a report of the CPA proclaiming that attacks were down 50% on the previous month,
the other a report from an
Independent reporter that said that whilst the attacks were down 50%, in an effort to avoid casualties, US patrols had been cut down to a third the number of the previous month. No idea if the latter claim is true or not, but it'd be a quick n cheap way of cooking the books on contacts/attacks.
Edited - my mistake: patrols were said to have been cut
by 2/3 not
to 2/3. Also I found the 2nd report - apparently it was syndicated from
The Independent (it's on their pay site, so I provided a different link). The first was SCMP's own, so you'll have to pay to see it - wouldn't bother though - it was essentially nearly verbatim from the CPA/CentCom press release.
