Numerical Analysis of U.S. Casualties in Iraq

I came across these tables related to America’s past wars - from the American Revolution up to the Gulf War – compiled from statistics provided by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.  They are posted at: 

http://www.veteranshour.com/facts_of_the_matter.htm

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It occurs to me that from the soldier’s point of view, an accurate comparison of “sacrifice” made in one war relative to another cannot be accomplished simply by citing total battle deaths or injuries.  An accurate risk assessment can only be achieved by normalizing death and injury statistics by the overall deployment of soldiers in any given conflict. 

I propose two parameters, D= deaths incurred / total soldiers deployed, and C = casualties incurred / total soldiers deployed.  Using the above tables, D = (battle deaths + other deaths in theater) / total deployed, and C = (battle deaths + other deaths in theater + non-mortal woundings) / total deployed.

Getting out the calculator, and keeping in mind that the data is incomplete in places, here are my results:

The Iraq War figures are based upon current statistics of 3,103 dead and 47,657 wounded (the exact number wounded is highly contested and possibly twice the official number).  Total soldiers deployed during the Iraq War conflict to date numbers about 500,000, including former coalition (non – U.S. soldier) members.  Civilian contractors were not included in the data.  Incidentally, civilian contractors numerically far exceed uniformed servicemen in Iraq, a unique phenomenon compared to all previous wars, including past conflicts heavily reliant on mercenary forces.

So what do we learn from the data?  Well at first glance, it looks like the death to deployment ratio for the Iraq War isn’t too bad compared to past conflicts, only exceeding the historical “cake-walks” of the Spanish-American War and the Gulf War.  However when one considers that the average American serviceman in Iraq has been redeployed to Iraq four to five times during the last three years (and some up to seven times), with no obvious cap on future redeployments, the total number of unique soldier deployments in Iraq decreases considerably, and the death to deployment ratio shoots up.  It is hard to get a handle on how much this redeployment phenomenon (again a phenomenon much more a phenomenon of the Iraq War than to any previous conflicts) skews the data.  My guess is that the death rate to deployment ratio could be anywhere from twice to four times as large when correcting for this (the same is true for the casualty rate).  In the 4X estimate, the death rate is now comparable to World War II and the Vietnam War.  Keep in mind that we are done killing people in WWII and Vietnam – we are not done killing U.S. servicemen in Iraq.

There is another startling twist in the data.  The C to D ratio is roughly 16 for the Iraq War, higher by far than any other U.S. conflict.  What does this mean?  We are saving many more injured soldiers than ever before.  These are the soldiers coming home limbless, faceless, otherwise horrifically deformed, or with severe neurological trauma leaving them in near vegetative states.  These are the soldiers that would be dead in any of our past conflicts, but our state of the art medical technology and excellent battlefield triage kept them alive.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that survival rates for the Iraq War were similar to the Vietnam War, where the C to D ratio was 3.5, not 16.  That would yield 14,503 dead soldiers and 36,257 wounded for a total 50,760 dead and wounded soldiers so far in the Iraq War. 

Oh, but wait a minute, as we already discussed, a lot of these soldiers were redeployed far more often than they would have been in any of our past wars, so the total unique deployments in the denominator of the death rate per deployment ratio should be smaller.  Let’s be conservative and cut it in half to about 250,000 unique deployments.  That would be equivalent to 29,006 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq if we had the same medical technology we had during the Vietnam War.  Remember that in Vietnam we had roughly 3.1 million soldiers deployed in total over the 11-year duration.  Now I don’t know how many unique deployments that would be, but I’m fairly certain that it would be a larger percentage of total than we have seen for our all-volunteer and overstretched military serving in Iraq.  Just for your curiosity, a fatality figure of 29,006 using Vietnam era medical technology, and a corrected unique deployment total of 250,000 in Iraq, yields a death to deployment ratio of D = 11.6%.  Nothing in the above table comes close.

So why go through this number crunching and numerical masturbation?  What am I trying to prove?  Well, certain people on the right feel that we have not prosecuted the Iraq war to the fullest extent possible, and by some twist of logic and misuse of the maxim War Is Hell, they seem to believe that meaningful engagement can only be measured by a war’s death toll, and that we have not shed enough blood or tears to give up in Iraq yet.  I read the writing on the wall somewhat differently, and the message is scrawled in blood.  I conclude that the Iraq War is a meat grinder, a needless opportunistic conflict, legal only because for the time being we are the law, growing worse everyday because of our very presence, and we are sending our sons and daughters off to be slaughtered.