Professor LS made an analysis a while ago that is close to what the President said today about the average numbers of terrorists who are killed and captured every month. I also believe that the President is conservative in his estimate because many of the injured terrorists who are carried out of the battlefield by their fleeing comrades will eventually die for lack of proper medical care (LS analysis).
Southack, did you hear Pres. Bush say this today?
Right. We’re identifying 1,500 bodies per month (i.e. captured or killed such that a body is in hand for the stats).
So that’s a *very* conservative number. Instantaneous kills on a battlefield are seldom the majority of casualties.
If you had to break it down historically, it would look something like this:
1. Most people survive each battle
2. People wounded in action
3. People killed in action
4. People missing in action
5. People captured
Those stats are only counting a subset of item #3 above. For instance, a body sufficiently buried or vaporized by an artillery shell or aircraft bomb won’t be included in the above count because there’s no body realistically available for a quick batttlefield stat count.
Items #2 and #4 are interesting because medical care comes into play. If the terrorists can match our level of medical care (impossible, but for the sake of argument and to be conservative) then they are experiencing a fairly known level of deaths long after the battle ends.
Moreover, significant wounds tend to take volunteer fighters completely out of the war. It wouldn’t be ludicrous to think that more than a few wounded terrorists went back home to be cared for by their families.
Notice that we don’t see videos of wounded terrorists doing any fighting...
Now, consider that on our side we expect from our historical experience to see about 8 times the number of wounded as dead/captured.
Well, extrapolated to the enemy (under the above conservative condition that their medical care is as good as ours, which it isn’t), that means that the 60,000+ enemy bodies that we’ve counted so far have at least another 480,000 wounded to go along with them.
Now, the word “casualties” means dead and wounded. So that’s a minimum of 540,000 enemy casualties so far in this war.
Minimum.
And this is in a nation of 17 million people, with only half of that population male (i.e. 8.5 million), and some 5+ million males who voted in both of the last two Iraqi elections (i.e. they are probably less likely to be a terrorist).
In that remaining 3.5 million there are some too young, some too old, and some too ill/feeble (or even ideologically disinclined to fight us)...and in whatever is left you’ve got 540,000 casualties.
Frankly, that’s devastating to the enemy. 1 to 2% foreign terrorists coming in isn’t going to replace losses on that scale. The above numbers hint at something like 1.6 million Iraqis who are both against us as well as *able* to fight.
That means the core warrior class opposed to us has suffered a 33.75% casualty rate (minimum...could be very much greater).
It’s a thing of great beauty.