Shelby Stanton, writing in The Rise and Fall of an American Army, declined to include casualty statistics because of their 'general unreliability.' Accurate assessments of PAVN/VC losses, he wrote, were 'largely impossible due to lack of disclosure by the Vietnamese government, terrain, destruction of remains by firepower, and [inability] to confirm artillery and aerial kills.' The 'shameful gamesmanship' practiced by 'certain reporting elements' under pressure to 'produce results' also shrouded the process. RJ Rummel estimates 1,011,000 PAVN/VC combatant deaths. The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. For this figure, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported enemy killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of the VC and PAVN military forces was probably closer to 444,000. Author Mark Woodruff noted that when the Vietnamese Government finally revealed its estimated losses (in April 1995) as being 1.1 million dead or missing, U.S body count figures had actually underestimated enemy losses. The Phoenix Program, a counterinsurgency program executed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), United States special operations forces, and the Republic of Vietnam's security apparatus, killed 26,369 suspected of being VC operatives and informants. Historian Christian Appy states "search and destroy was the principal tactic; and the enemy body count was the primary measure of progress" in the US strategy of attrition. Search and destroy was a term to describe operations aimed at flushing the Viet Cong out of hiding, while body count was the measuring stick for operation success and this resulted in exaggeration and listing civilian deaths as enemy KIA. One study estimated that American commanders exaggerated body counts by 100 percent. Other casualties The PAVN/VC forces suffered around 600,000 wounded during the war, and prior to the 1975 spring offensive, lost at least 26,880 soldiers taken prisoner - being released after the 1973 Peace Accords. Additionally, according to the U.S. military, they also lost up to 101,511 personnel as defectors due to the Chieu Hoi program, but one analyst speculates that less than 25% of those were genuine. United States armed forces Casualties as of 4 May 2021: 58,281 KIA or non-combat deaths (including the missing and deaths in captivity) 153,372 WIA (excluding 150,332 persons not requiring hospital care) 1,584 MIA (originally 2,646)