Military Casualties

RedState.com comments on some military casualty figures over time:

Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you will find quite a few surprises. First of all, let's compare numbers of US Military personnel that died during the first term of the last four presidents.

George W. Bush . . . . . 5187 (2001-2004)
Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . 4302 (1993-1996)
George H.W. Bush . . . . 6223 (1989-1992)
Ronald Reagan . . . . . . 9163 (1981-1984)

Even during the (per MSM) utopic peacetime of Bill Clinton's term, we lost 4302 service personnel. H.W. Bush and Reagan actually lost significantly more personnel while never fighting an extensive war, much less a simultaneous war on two theaters (Iraq and Afghanistan). Even the dovish Carter lost more people during his last year in office, in 1980 lost 2392, than W. has lost in any single year of his presidency. (2005 figures are not available but I would wager the numbers would be slightly higher than 2004.)

(some spelling corrected) RedState notes that Bush has lost fewer soldiers than Reagan and even Clinton did, so things really aren't going so badly. The analysis is somewhat misleading.

First of all, these casualty figures aggregate simple accidents, combat, murder, illness, suicides, and terrorist attacks into a single value. The raw data show that the number of deaths due to accidents has gone down dramatically over the years, as has the number of soldiers being murdered. These categories dominate the total deaths every year except 2003 and 2004, so their declines account for the overall reduction in military deaths that RedState notes.

What's gone up, of course, is combat deaths. Reagan had very few (19 in the year range RedState considers) whereas W. Bush has well over a thousand. That's not surprising given that Reagan fought no wars but Bush has two.

Secondly, raw numbers are reported but what is not considered is that the military in Reagan's day was considerably larger than today. Looking at the raw numbers RedState links to, I estimate an average military size of about 2.1 million in Reagan's day versus 1.4 million in W. Bush's era. Normalizing the death count for the two by these estimates, both presidents come out with a death rate of about 0.4%. So, while the absolute numbers have gone down quite a bit, primarily because of fewer accidents, the rates are not all that different.

Basically, these data show Reagan lost men to accidents, Bush to war. Is that really something to praise the president for?