Counting the Cost Casualties
If you're shocked by American casualties in Iraq, you should be shocked by how few there have been, says the writer of a TechCentralStation piece today that provides a statistical look at combat casualties.

In this day, where every battle death becomes a three-minute drama looped endlessly through our TV screens, the American media seem preoccupied with how many casualties the American public can "take." But the fact is, we are seeing amazingly light casualties. The U.S. suffered 7,500 dead and thousands more wounded over less than three months in the battle to take Okinawa from the Japanese in 1945 (more than 100,000 Japanese troops were killed). The drive to retake Seoul from North Korean Communists in September 1950 cost the U.S. 6,000 casualties over 10 days following the Inchon Landing. The North and the South each lost over 11,000 killed and wounded in one day at Antietam, September 17, 1862. It remains the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history.

Consider these numbers:
- The 53,402 American battle deaths in World War I constituted 1.1 percent of the total U.S. military.
- The 291,557 battle deaths in War II were 1.8 percent.
- The 33,686 in Korea were six tenths of a percent.
- The 47,410 in Vietnam were a half of a percent of the total in the services.
- The 147 deaths in Gulf War combat were six one-thousandths of a percent of the total U.S. military.
- From the American Revolution to the Gulf War, the U.S. has had 650,954 soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen killed in action, 1.5 percent of the total who have served. (These figures are extrapolated from U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs historical statistics.)

There is an interesting paradox, or at least a seeming one, in the relation of war casualties to the awesome lethality of modern weapons. Casualties as a percentage of the deployed combat force on both sides in wars have been declining for the past four centuries even as the killing power of weapons has increased.

Good stuff - let's hope the gloom-and-doomers on the teevee and at the New York Times read it.