As each day passes, I hear a greater number of people complaining about American casualties in Iraq. Others bemoan our occupation there, and decry it as another “quagmire”, in which countless numbers of American troops will be killed. According to antiwar.com, there have been 588 American combat casualties since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
How bad is 588 casualties, exactly? The only objective way to look at the number is in relation to other American military actions. Therefore, a good set of data to compare Operation Iraqi Freedom to is the casualty figures from all other previous wars involving America. For the sake of relevance, I’m not going to include any NATO actions, as their multinational nature dilutes individual countries’ casualty rates. As a editorial note, I’m also going to compare combat casualties rather than overall casualties. There’s no reason for this other than the fact that the data has already been calcualted (for the most part), saving me time. However, after having done some calculations on total casualties, the numbers tell the same story.
The most direct way I know of to compare combat casualties is by examining the total number in each of the conflicts. The following table lists the number of total deaths suffered by America in each war we’ve been in, chronologically.
| War | Casualties |
|---|---|
| Revolutionary War | 4,435 |
| War of 1812 | 2,260 |
| Mexican War | 1,733 |
| Civil War | 184,594 |
| Spanish-American War | 385 |
| World War I | 53,513 |
| World War II | 292,131 |
| Korean War | 33,651 |
| Vietnam War | 47,369 |
| Gulf War | 148 |
| Operation Iraqi Freedom | 588 |
If you read that table like I do, this conflict has the third fewest casualties of every American war in history; it’s second only to the Gulf War, which lasted one month, and the Spanish-American War, which was only six weeks of sustained combat.
Of course, those figures alone don’t tell us the whole story. It also depends what percentage of troops involved were killed, right? In smaller conflicts involving fewer troops, it’s likely that you’ll have fewer mortalities. So let’s take a look at the percentages of Americans KIA with respect to military enrollment.
| War | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Revolutionary War | 2.2% |
| War of 1812 | 0.8% |
| Mexican War | 2.2% |
| Civil War | 4.8% |
| Spanish-American War | 0.1% |
| World War I | 1.1% |
| World War II | 1.8% |
| Korean War | 0.6% |
| Vietnam War | 0.5% |
| Gulf War | 0.00% |
| Operation Iraqi Freedom | 0.00% |
Next to the Gulf War (by a hair), the Iraqi occupation has killed a smaller percentage of troops than any other American conflict in our history). The next least damaging war, the Spanish-American War, had over a ten-fold increase in percentage (the actual figure for OIF troops KIA is around 0.004%).
This doesn’t tell us, however, how bad has the war been on an ongoing basis. Surely the length of a conflict should be taken into account, as it will affect the numbers of overall troop mortality. Below is a table specifiying the number of troops killed in action per month of combat. The figure of 588 American casualties in OIF was taken in March, so we will take only those twelve months into account.
| War | KIA Rate |
|---|---|
| Revolutionary War | 55/mo. |
| War of 1812 | 75/mo. |
| Mexican War | 87/mo. |
| Civil War | 3,846/mo. |
| Spanish-American War | 96/mo. |
| World War I | 2,816/mo. |
| World War II | 6,639/mo. |
| Korean War | 909/mo. |
| Vietnam War | 526/mo. |
| Gulf War | 148/mo. |
| Operation Iraqi Freedom | 49/mo. |
Operation Iraqi Freedom claims first place. The closest war, with respect to fewest casualties per month was the Revolutionary War. Yes, you read that correctly. We have to go back to the birth of our country, the late seventeen-hundreds, to find a war with a similar rate of troops killed in action over time.
My take on this? Only Americans would be fooled into believing that a figure representing one of the greatest strengths of this war, with respect to all others (its overall bloodlessness, as far as wars go) is an argument against it. Of course, this isn’t the first time that such a tactic has been tried. I guess statistics really are relative.
Most of these statistics were lifted off of the United States Civil War Center webpage.
Kat | 26-May-04 at 10:32 pm | Permalink
You know it’s true, looking through all your tables, I see that we indeed have lost the least amount of troops overtime. But we shouldn’t even be there. I have heard arguments saying that we went over there cause of 9/11, Iraq has ties to Al-Qaida. Well of course it has ties, it is an arab country, Israel has ties to Al-Qaida, hell there are ties to Al-Qaida in America. We went over there because Saddam was hiding WMDs. Well.. where are they, the only ones that I have ever seen were the ones that Saddam was ordered to destroy which he did. Now, I’m not supporting Saddam or anything, he’s evil and everything like that. Daddy Bush couldn’t finish the job, so his son did, and we’re losing American lives, my friends’ lives, because son wants to make daddy proud. War on Terror, I support, but hell everyone’s forgotten about “the other war” even though that was the one that was first started. My cousin is over in Afghanistan, searching for Bin Laden, but everyone is supporting the troops in Iraq and have forgotten about that jerk off.
588 lives is 588 lives to many for a war we did not need.
Stephen Touset | 26-May-04 at 10:38 pm | Permalink
Those five-hundred eighty-eight soldiers may have given their lives in order to save tens of thousands of Iraqis’. Or possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans, by preventing an attack by chemical or biological weapons (remember, thousands of metric tons of V-x and mustard gas can be stored in one tractor trailer).
The loss of 588 American soldiers, while tragic, may have saved the lives of countless others. That alone would cause their sacrifice to be worth it.
As far as justification for the war, and a breakdown of Iraqi weapons’ violations, read Hidden Weapons.