IN 1991, Pentagon planners secretly estimated that one in three of the 600,000 US troops deployed to the Gulf to eject Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait could become victims of germ warfare.

If the war was conventional, with no nerve gas or biological attacks, they guessed at 18,000 Americans killed in action.

Even optimistic assessments proved wildly inaccurate. The final butcher's bill for America was just 147, and 35 of those were victims of "friendly fire". The 20,000 bodybags shipped to the region in advance went home unused.
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Some officers are concerned that the US public has become used to "sterile warfare" involving few fatalities and maximum use of precision-guided hardware. The worry is that popular opinion would turn swiftly against the prosecution of any war in which the opposition proved less amenable to being overwhelmed and started to stack up allied bodies in front of their positions.

Since Vietnam, in which the US suffered 58,000 dead, the White House has also become ultra-sensitive to military losses. US forces were withdrawn from Somalia in 1993 after 18 Rangers and Delta Force troopers were ambushed and slain in Mogadishu.

Withdrawal was also the end result a decade earlier when Hizbollah Islamic suicide bombers drove a truck bomb into US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 240 peacekeepers.

Public opinion has remained firmly behind the war against terrorism since September 11, although only 26 Americans have died in Afghanistan so far. At least five of those fell in "fratricidal accidents", as friendly fire incidents are now described.

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