OxBlog

Sunday, January 11, 2004

# Posted 11:42 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

I WANT NUMBERS! Has anyone else noticed that the NYT no longer tells you how many American soldiers have died in combat during the occupation? Instead, we only get the total number of military fatalities since the start of the war, including non-combat deaths.

It's hard to know what brought about the change. On the one hand, it's nice not to have the press obsessively measuring American success or failure in terms of the body count. After all, wars are often won by spending lives to achieve strategic objectives. On the other hand, focusing on total fatalities allows the NYT and others to raise the death toll to almost 500 while avoiding the distinction between those lost to hostile fire and those lost to accidents.

Well, if you're interested in finding out for yourself what's going on, the place to turn (as always) is Lunaville, which is still running an up-to-date casualty count that analyzes American losses from a number of different perspectives. As is fairly well known, US combat fatalities doubled from October to Novermber but fell by half in December, returning to the original figure of about 40. What I didn't know was that there were 422 combat casualties in October, 332 in November and 244 in December (plus 73 in early January).

Thanks to Lunaville, you can also break down casualties by rank, location, week or even specific type of death, e.g. firefight vs. roadside bomb. Remember, knowledge is power.
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