Another Look at 'Grim Milestone'


Death Rates tell the real tale....

Much hay has been made on both sides about the "Grim Milestone" of 2000 military deaths "in Iraq".

Have 2000 troops died. Yes, of course, but the main argument is how you count the numbers. The many different types of death all add up to 2000, but it is a disingenuous way to measure the "cost of war". And in that sense, this milestone is an arbitrary one.

Here is a look at non-hostile military deaths versus hostile deaths between 1980 and 2004 (Data from DoD sources):


These numbers of course are worldwide, and not just Iraq. So what this shows us is that more military people die outside of Iraq, than in the conflict. Soldiers die every year in helicopter crashes here in the US, but for some reason the left isn't demanding we "bring the troops home" from Fort Hood.

It is easy to see that the military had been trending downward in its non-hostile deaths (includes Accidents, Homicides, Illness, Pending, Suicide, Terror, Unknown). The low point was 758 in 2000. Since the start of the GWOT, the trend has gone up, due to the the increased Ops Tempo. This results from more accidents primarily.

However if one wants to look at military deaths, looking a plain totals is the wrong way to approach the task. Since totals (like 2000) are pretty arbitrary, I think it is better to look at death rates.

A graphical looks at the rates (per 10,000) look just like the graph above:


Add to that a further breakdown of the non-hostile deaths show the uptrend in accidents and illness starting in 2001.

Ultimately the numbers for hostile fire have never eclipsed non-hostile numbers in either totals (2004: 737 v. 1150) or rate (2004: 4.31 v. 6.72). Given that trends follow the ops tempo, I would expect to see this years total to be about the same as 2004 for both categories.

Another way to look at these numbers is to compare the rates to those in our free society.

Remember even in our increased ops tempo, the rates per 10,000 were 4.31 for hostile fire, 6.72 for everything else, for a total of 11.02 total deaths per 10,000 military members.

Now the overall death rate for the entire population of the US is 84.5 per 10,000. Of course that is not a fair comparison, since a lot of the 84.5 are people are the end of their natural lives, while the majority of military members are fairly young.

If we want to tighten the sample, and bring violence into the equation, lets look at the murder rate for 2004. According to the FBI, the murder rate per 10,000 is 55.0.

No matter how you cut it only a 0.0 death rate is a good death rate. But that being impossible, especially in an increased ops tempo, looking at Iraq (and the GWOTs) military death toll when compared to the outside world, recent modern military trends, and previous conflicts, shows both military deaths to be quite low in both numbers and rate.

Posted: Thu - October 27, 2005 at 11:25 PM          

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