Posted on 11/03/2007 9:08:48 AM PDT by InfantryMarine
“No. The numbers are meaningless unless you know the number of people in the military each year.”
Each number represents the lives of American service-people. Hardly “meaningless”.
This thread is not about percentages, ratios, or denominators. It’s about the NUMBER of American service-members lost each year.
Even you should be able to grasp that but you seem to have a hard time grasping anything that conflicts with your preconceived notions.
Here is a chart that tells the actual death rate in the years that you list.
http://www.murdoconline.net/pics/mildeathcharts.html
Great catch. Really puts things in perspective. MSM would never report on this — violates their storyline of soliders as victims instead of heroes.
bttt
Well let’s see. In 1980 .11% of the people in the military died.
And in 2000 .05% of the people in the military died.
By ignoring the population, you have no idea of the “death rate.”
A major factor (perhaps THE major factor) is the dramatic improvement in trauma care over the last decade. We are saving many that previously would have been lost.
Noted! Thank you
And you know this how?
He was the guy who typed the letters for the officers to sign. He saw just about everything that went on in his unit. So if he was an idiot he misunderstood what he was seeing. Unlikely. If he was full of crap, then he was intentionally lying. Not sure why he would make that kind of stuff up.
Many of the fatalities are accidental deaths - vehicle rollovers, falling coke machines, training-related deaths, etc. The NCO who died at Ft. Hood during a LandNav course this summer is a classic example of deaths that occur, as is the Colonel I worked for who died of a heart attack during his morning PT run.
TRADOC (training and doctrine command) was making a full-court press effort at reducing accidental and training deaths the last few years of my service - '90-'96. That should serve to explain part of the drop in numbers in the list above during those years.
It may be interesting to note that many of the OEF/OIF deaths are accidental rather than being combat related.
Just a sidebar...the fellow I mentioned has been nicely memorialized:
Library to be dedicated to fort soldier killed in Iraq
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1666205/posts
Perhaps those figures are not yet available. That’s just my guess.
There hasn’t been a reduction in accidental deaths in the military. They just aren’t shown for the last two years on this graph. The accidental deaths, deaths from illness, and self inflicted deaths have remained fairly constant. The only increase in deaths is the number who have died in combat, which are already well known.
what is amazing is that under clinton, there were 8,033 military deaths, under bush, counting the casualties of war, there were 7,803
But also traffic accidents, heart attacks, cancer, etc.
Get a few million people in one group, many more deaths occur than we realize. (A younger, more healthy crowd skews the statistics, but this is indeed, very sobering.)
Thanks for the heads-up. I’m going to Huachuca next year for a reunion. I’ll be sure to look at this.
It is said that there are fewer combat & bomb deaths in Iraq than in CA: a similar size area with equal populations.
I get 7514 under Clinton, and 7033 under Bush. Your comparison is inaccurate because the numbers from 2005-2006 are incomplete. These numbers are not useful anyway, as far as military success is concerned. A certain percentage of all populations will die in any given time frame. This includes the military. Clinton is not responsible for the 1040 deaths in 1995, any more than Bush is responsible for the 891 deaths in 2001. People die, all the time. Even in the military.
There were no US soldiers killed in the Serbian conflict, which might explain why you didn’t hear about it. You seem to not understand that these non-combat related deaths are the same as deaths in any other population. Illnesses, accidents and suicides would not be in the news, because they happen every day, and there are way too many to record.
If you compare combat and bombing deaths in Iraq with all the deaths in California, that is true. If you compare all of the deaths in Iraq, with all the deaths in California, that is most definately not true. It is far safer in California than Iraq.
For later.
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