Fester's Place

Casualties in Iraq

I am sick and disgusted when people say "Iraq is safer than X" where X is someplace in the United States with a crime problem. There are two problems with this statement; first it is untrue, and secondly, the deaths in Iraq were fundamentally avoidable and deferable. Thirdly, the truest comparison would be a per-capita death basis for US cops and firefighters and the US military in Iraq, not the overall death rate.

So let's get some evidence together, again, and show that the death rate from March 20, 2003 to today, October 27, 2003 in Iraq is dissimiliar to the US civilian death rate for the appropriate population. Here are the assumptions that I am making; 35% of the US force is between the ages of 15-24, 35% are between the ages of 25-34, 25% are between the ages of 35-44, 3.5% are between the ages of 45-54, 1.5% are between the ages of 55-64. These are rough guestimates; if anyone has better data, please tell me.

I am also assuming that the US has maintained a constant force of 135,000 soldiers in Iraq. To slightly simplify the calculations, I am assuming that US forces are in Iraq for 8 months instead of 8 months, 1 week... or about 66.67% of the year.

Using this 1999 Center for Disease Control mortality table, we get a blended mortality rate of 146.4 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Since the US has only been in Iraq for 8 months, the expected mortality rate is 97.6 deaths/100,000.

If serving in Iraq is no more dangerous than living in the United States, than the death toll from accidents, illnesses, unexplained causes and combat should be around 132 deaths. However, this is not the case. As of today, October 27, 2003, the United States has lost 353 lives in occupying Iraq. Overall, compared to the general population it is 2.6 times more fatal to be deployed in Iraq than to be in the United States.

There are a couple of problems with this analysis; first as I admitted above, the age composition is definately a WAG. I suspect that the US military is a little younger than the force that I assumed above. If that is the case, it will be significantly more dangerous than the number that I just suggested above. Secondly, this calculation has no measure of the assumed rate of amputations, severe trauma and other serious wounds. I would suspect that losing an arm is considered dangerous, and that the risk of losing said arm is dramatically higher in Iraq than it is in the United States. So, I believe if anything is wrong with my estimates here about mortality rates, it is because I am deliberately introducing an undercount.

UPDATE This story has a partial age breakdown of the casualties. 50% of US fatalities are to soldiers under the age of 25. The story is offering a convuluted definition(I think that the reporters don't understand a non-commissioned officer is an enlisted man) but it seems that casualities across ranks are reasonably close to proportionally distributed, so if this assumption is true, then the age distribution comes down and the relative risk increases dramatically.

Labels: iraq

posted by fester @ 16:05