Considering the pain and suffering that wars cause, you wouldn't think it would be difficult to determine how many there are in a year.
But the National Defense Council Foundation registers more than twice as many battle zones on its year-end list as the more liberal Center for Defense Information. And the CIA has still a third count.Considerable disagreement also rages over what to do to stop bloodshed, whether from ethnic conflict, insurgency, drug violence, civil unrest or civil war.
The Virginia-based foundation, which sees protection for the United States only through increased military spending, released a list Monday of 64 world hot spots - down from the record 71 it counted a year earlier. The count reverses a seven-year trend, but conservative analysts caution against lowering the guard.
"The meaning of the whole thing is that the United States shouldn't be unilaterally disarming in the face of a conflictive world," said retired Army Maj. F. Andy Messing Jr., the foundation's executive director. "Just because we've had the first downward trend doesn't mean that 1997 will be a more peaceful year."
The Center for Defense Information, which holds that more arms breed more conflict, is preparing its own report listing 27 active conflicts and 10 that have turned mainly nonviolent but remain unsettled. The group counted only 20 active wars last year.
"You can throw any arbitrary criterion in that you want," said retired Adm. Eugene Carroll, the center's deputy director. Even though the center's list remains shorter that the foundation's list, he said, it still shows far too much bloody conflict that cannot be reduced with more U.S. aircraft carriers and high-tech bombers.
The Central Intelligence Agency withholds details of its list but tallied 28 conflicts in 1996, with several dropped and others added since last year's count of 27.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency lists only areas with "high levels of organized violence between states or between contending groups within a state or with high levels of political or societal tension likely to erupt into violence."
Mansfield said intelligence agencies list conflicts, while other groups list countries affected by wars. Private groups also are far less restrictive in their definition of war.
Obviously, war-counting is inexact and complex. Defining war by assigning a threshold of casualties is impossible, when neither side in battle offers reliable information or access by objective observers.
The picture is further blurred with spreading and shifting conflicts like the trouble in the Balkans and central Africa.
The National Defense Council Foundation, for example, counts Serbia and Bosnia as separate conflict areas, while the CIA combines them into the Balkan conflict.
The foundation says its longer list includes all world conflict areas, without regard to how many people were killed, injured or displaced.
Listed conflicts range from ethnic war in the Balkans to drug violence, organized crime and terrorism in the United States.