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News transcript from the United States Department of Defense.

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M2 PRESSWIRE-31 March 2005-US DOD: News transcript from the United States Department of Defense

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RDATE:30032005

NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You talked about measuring progress in Iraq. Metrics as you called them, that were important to you. And you said what you measure improves.

How are some ways that you are measuring progress in defeating insurgents in Iraq?

RUMSFELD: Well, we've got literally dozens of ways we do it. We have a room here, the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.

We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. And what we're seeing, for example, and one metric is presented graphically and it shows that we had spiked up during the sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked up again during the election, and are now back down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are considerably lower.

NPR: Fifty-some attacks a day or something like that?

RUMSFELD: I don't know what the number is, I don't have it in front of me. But we track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.

So there are a lot of different ways to do it. What you aren't able to do is keep track of how many there are. The reason for that is they don't have roll call in the morning. They don't have a roster that we can capture, for example. Or you can't photograph them and know how many there are.

NPR: It seems that might be a problem with a lot of these numbers.

Like, for example, number of attacks per day. It might go down for a...

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