Casualty Rates, Fishing and Fighting

A recent measure of Iraq War coverage shows the TV Networks are no longer covering the war. The obvious presumption is that the lack of coverage is because casualties are down. Many blogs suspect political motivations (e.g., Glenn Reynolds and John Hinderaker)

While it is obviously impossible to know what future casualties will be, the steep reduction in Iraq makes it an interesting time point to stop and try to assess.

Such comparisons must be done carefully, both because it must not be seen to denigrate even a single soldier's death as trivial and it must hold up to scrutiny, unlike some claims. Nonetheless, comparisons of casualty rates is critical to provide perspective and the total human cost of the war. In the following, the focus is on death rates as they are both most important and not subject to definition and category problems.

There have been about 4,000 U.S. Armed Services people killed in the Iraq War and about 450 killed in Afghanistan. These come from among the slightly greater than one million armed services personnel, so the annual death rate over the 5 years of the War on Terror is about 100/100,000.

Occupational death rates are available from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. They list forestry and fishing as the most deadly (major) occupation with an annual death rate of 112/100,000.

One may argue, of course, that the 'proper' base group for war death rate is the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than the entire armed forces. With this subset of the armed forces, the annual death rate is about 400 or 500/100,000. There is, however, a deadlier subset of fishermen too. The crab fishermen of Alaska (featured in the documentary "Deadliest Catch"). These fishermen are subject to a similar, 400/100,000 annual death rate.

It is the nature of the world that all men die. Some lose their lives fighting for a cause. One can argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars are or were mistakes, but one must keep a perspective on the risk. The mainstream media, in their obsession with casualty rates, never achieved perspective.