War Handwavium

A report was made for US Congress on 14 May 2008. It tries to give an overview of US military casualties throughout its history, and specifically analyzes military losses from 1980 through 2006.

You can read the report here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

In response to this, some emails are floating around quoting this report out of context trying to assert that the cost of the Iraq war is less than the total number of deaths under Clinton or Carter. It is nothing more than trying to handwave the violence.

First of all, page 11 of the report is probably a good start. It lists total casualties per year and then breaks it down into different causes. The largest cause of fatalities is accidents. Accidents result from training accidents, equipment failures, aircraft crashes, vehicle collisions, and so on. Accidents in the military are sort of like accidents on the highway. If you’re going to allow people to drive cars on the freeway, you’re going to have to accept that accidents will happen and people will die. If you’re going to have an active military force of hundreds of thousands of troops, you’re going to have to accept that accidents will happen and some of these accidents will be fatal.

However, what you don’t have to accept is war fatalities. War isn’t something that just happens automatically out of having a large military force. You actually have to go out of your way to go to war. You have to spend lots of money above and beyond your normal military budgets to go to war. So, while military accidents come with having a military force, war fatalities are fatalities above and beyond, are fatalities that occur as an outcome of choosing to go to war.

Furthermore, the emails about this report focuses strictly on the fatalities. The report doesn’t examine permanent disabilities, post traumatic stress disorder, or any other condition where the person lives but is permanently disabled in some way or another. These costs are also direct costs of the war.

The handwave is “Hey! Look! The number of fatalities in Iraq is less than the number of accidental deaths under Clinton!” The implication is that we shouldn’t worry about the deaths in Iraq because they’re so small. But what this ignores is that accidental deaths come from having a military force. Whereas war deaths come only from war operations, and we as a democratic nation have a say in whether our country goes to war.

So, here’s the non-handwave timeline, I added an extra column for permanently disabled figures. Links to that data is below. What becomes clear is that the human cost of the first Iraq war and the second Iraq war is huge and dwarfs the cost associated with training accidents over the years.

      total  fatal     war  permanently
year  fatal accident fatal  disabled     president
1980  2,392  1,556     174               Carter
1981  2,380  1,524     145               Reagan
1982  2,319  1,495     108
1983  2,465  1,413      18
1984  1,999  1,293       1
1985  2,252  1,476       0
1986  1,984  1,199       2
1987  1,983  1,172      37
1988  1,819  1,080       0
1989  1,636  1,000      23               Bush Sr
1990  1,507    880       0
1991  1,787    931     147   183,000
1992  1,293    676       0
1993  1,213    632      19               Clinton
1994  1,075    544       0
1995  1,040    538       0
1996    974    527       1
1997    817    433       0
1998    827    445       0
1999    796    436       0
2000    758    398       0
2001    891    434       3               Bush Jr.
2002    999    542      18    
2003  1,228    576     343     +
2004  1,874    605     739     |
2005  1,942    644     739     V
2006  1,858    530     761   150,000
 
(View in courier font to get everything to line up)

By the year 2000, US Department of Veterans Affairs will have declared 183,000 US veterans of the Gulf War to be *permanently disabled* from effects of Gulf War syndrome.

http://www.accuracy.org/article.php?articleId=44

the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits. Pentagon studies show that 12 percent of soldiers who have served in Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The group Veterans for America, formerly the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, estimates 70,000 Iraq war veterans have gone to the VA for mental health care.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36056

The short of it is, war isn’t cheap. Don’t let anyone try to use smoke and mirrors (or out of context statistics) to tell you otherwise.