Way to many factors here. What war. What military. What unit. What year.

A conventional unit that is partaking in the early parts of Afghanistan that has a E3 engage someone is going to have different reporting requirements than a special operations unit in 2013. One probably is going to have zero reporting for the shooter and anything written down will be be down by officers or senior enlisted. Other probably will require a shooters statement.

The Vietnam War became a war of attrition. McNamara was a numbers freak. They DID have a body count, reported to the Pentagon on punched cards. Ours and the Viet Cong/NVA. Not unlike a football score.

There were accusations of people sandbagging the score since the top brass were putting so much pressure on it.

usually units from platoon upward report their BDA (battle damage assessment). this is fed to the intelligence sections so they can produce reports on percentage of remaining effectiveness of whatever adversary unit they were facing.

a BDA will include estimates on vehicles damaged or destroyed, by type (ex 2 tanks, 1 IFV) and number of adversary personnel killed and captured.

If you are thinking of the movie trope about “confirmed kills”, know that that’s only really a thing for snipers and pilots.

Snipers have logbooks (and spotters), because a sniper’s primary job isn’t necessarily even sniping. It’s scouting. They’re reporting enemy activity they saw, to include anyone they killed. Especially those of higher consequence (ie, high ranking).

Pilots keep track of air to air kills because they’re extremely rare, since the last real peer to peer fight we had with an enemy air force was in Vietnam. Five kills makes you an “ace”, and there hasn’t been one of those since Vietnam.

Normal soldiers/Marines may keep track personally of how many or who they’ve killed, but it’s not an official statistic. It will absolutely be mentioned and tracked as part of a larger after action report after any enemy contact, because that plays into the larger intelligence picture on enemy activity. But it doesn’t work like a tally sheet, where PVT Ramirez has 13 confirmed kills and the most in the platoon.

After action report. “We took ambush fire, I popped a guy in the melon and he went down.”

“Yeah I saw that.”

Confirmed kill.

If there was a process to report kia outside of a daily sitrep for the ODA, I wasn’t aware of it.

Not really. As pilots we can log our actual weapon release and impacts in a training activity report that goes in our flight records but unless you’re keeping track yourself there is no tracking people. Honestly it’s a little morbid but I do know folks who do it.

We had to do BDAs in Afghanistan, and then shot reports once we got back to our patrol base. Everyone knew who the good shots were. Only the psychos boasted about their count.

It varies depending on country, war, branch of service, job, mission, etc.

But very generally speaking, there’s reporting conducted at the end of the engagement.

I was in the army. For regular soldiers, we just engage – there is no reporting or confirmation. After it’s all said and done you relay an estimate to command, but there is no official tally on an individual service members record.