Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton just highlighted a new, dishonest, and despicable attempt at spinning the casualty figures from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This new spin is simple: military deaths under Bush aren't much different than the deaths under Clinton, so why is everyone picking on poor Dubya?
Ed quotes one right-wing blog:
Active duty deaths during Clinton's first four years (1993 - 1996): 4302
Active duty deaths during Bush's first four years (2001 - 2004): 5187
Ed points out a couple of problems with the comparison (it's based on all deaths, not combat deaths, and it doesn't allow for consideration of the stupidity of the situation in Iraq), but there's one big one that he missed: the problem with looking at the raw number of dead. You see, things change over time - and one of those things is the size of the American Military. It shrunk during the Clinton years, but it hasn't grown much since then. This means that you get a very different picture of looking at the death rate for the military instead of the number of dead people.
To get that different picture, I used the same Pentagon source that Ed did, input the numbers from that source into an Excel spreadsheet, and computed the number of deaths per 100,000 Full-Time Equivalent active-duty troops for each year from 1980-2006. (The Pentagon gets the Full-Time Equivalent number by figuring out what all of the training time for reservists and national guard troops works out to, then adds that to the number of folks on full-time active duty for the year. Since the death of someone doing their annual two weeks of training is considered to be an active duty death, this is the appropriate number to use to get the death rate. I used all of the available years to try and get a broader picture than just the last two Presidencies.)
The result:
Based on this, it doesn't look at all like the Clinton Presidency - or the 1st Bush Presidency, or the Reagan Presidency - is remotely similar to the current administration when it comes to the active duty death rate. From here, it looks like there was a fairly smooth and steady decline in the death rate between 1980 and 2000, a relatively moderate increase from 2001-2003, and a massive increase coinciding with the post-aircraft-carrier-end-of-major-combat-mission-accomplished-speech era. That's nothing like the picture that the right-wingers were trying to paint.
All in all, though, who gives a damn what the numbers actually are? I brought them up to demonstrate that the new spin is, in addition to being enormously disrespectful of active duty troops living and dead, thoroughly dishonest. But, even if it were not dishonest, and even if it were not wrong, it would make no difference.
During wars, soldiers die. That is the unfortunate nature of war, and there's not a chance in hell that we'll come up with casualty-free conflicts anytime in the near future. During peacetime, soldiers die. That's the nature of working in a risky job, where nasty accidents can happen. There's not a chance in hell of changing that soon, either. Unless both of those things chance, anyone who joins the military is putting his or her life on the line in the service of the nation. As a nation, we owe them something in return.
We have a responsibility to do our best to keep the active duty troops from dying unnecessarily. During peacetime, that means making sure that training and day-to-day operations are as safe as they can reasonably be, and that accidents are prevented whenever possible. During wartime, it means that we should do our best to make sure that the fight is necessary, that the goals are achievable, and that there is a well-thought-out and feasible strategy in place.
The current battle in Iraq meets exactly none of those criteria.
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If I read these figures correctly, being a US serviceman during the 1990's was actually rather safer than being an inhabitant of Washington DC. Or perhaps I should say that being an inhabitant of DC was more dangerous than ...
Rather a chilling thought, actually.
@Stephen:
If you are comparing the raw rates of death in the military vs. some civilian population, you are not reading the data right (well, maybe right, but not meaningfully), because the military may well represent a demographic that for reasons unrelated to being in uniform have less risk of dying. Active duty soldiers are not usually sixty-some years old, for one thing.
To arrive at a figure that can be meaningfully compared to active-duty deaths, you would need to rinse out such purely age-based effects, likely along with some other demographics as well. This is not a trivial exercise, btw, since it is very much an open question whether to control for such factors as obesity, to take just one example - do the soldiers not become obese because they are soldiers, or are they soldiers at least partially because they are not obese?
Statistics is fun. But it's hard to do honestly.
- JS
JS: I'm really not at all sure what you are referring to. I am talking about murder rates in Washington DC (I thought that went without saying). The risk of being murdered in Washington DC in the 1990's was higher than the risk of being killed in enemy action as a serviceman. (Actually it was higher than that plus service-related accidents.)
I don't see what effects you are referring to: are obese people more often murder victims or something?
Oh. Then you were making a meaningful statement. My bad. I misread.
- JS
Stephan, in addition to the age thing, the services strongly select for health/fitness. Actually those numbers are quite low, if we could
maintain a mortality of 100/10000 regardless of age our life expectancy would ne 1000 years! The most striking thing about the graph, aside from the combat related reunup is how much it declined in the preceeding decades. Looks like a pretty impressive feat.
There were over 600 murders a year in DC? Not a good time.