Causes of Non-Hostile Deaths in Iraq

January 7th, 2008 · No Comments· 52 views

This chart represents data from March 19, 2003 to December 8, 2007. DoD link [PDF file]

Losses to non-hostile causes account for 18.6% of the deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF. The accident category would include motor vehicle accidents, and aircraft crashes that are not due to combat. Of the 718 losses in this data, 34 are undetermined or pending, less than 5%.

Many of the pundits following my continued accounting of terrorist losses and our losses in comparison point out that I exclude these non-hostile deaths. I do so because I believe that any reasonable statistical model would recognize that a given number of people will die due to these causes regardless of their deployment to Iraq. If X people per hundred thousand are statistically going to die in motor vehicle accidents, some of them will be in Iraq.

In fact, it may be accurate to suggest that some of these rates decline in wartime. DoD publishes a PDF with the rates from 1980 through 2006. I analyzed that data previously on November 16, 2007.

One category is a candidate for being affected by OIF.

active duty military death rates due to accidents 1980-2006

While accidental deaths can occur in ones and twos, they are the only category subject to increase due to mass casualty incidents. A loaded helicopter that crashes can kill a dozen or more. That represents 2.6% of the overall total for deaths due to accidents for all of OIF. That puts an uptick in any graphical representation of the data. And… such accidents happen in peacetime as the graph above illustrates. Tempo dictates some of this category’s losses. See the figures in the 1980’s. Our troops in Europe and Korea were training at an increased tempo from those in the 1990’s.

I will argue that even absent OIF, our troop training would be at an increased tempo, and our losses due to accidents would be similar. OIF is not the entire War on Terror.

It’s a topic that reasonable people can disagree on.

Accident prevention is an issue that the military is spending a great deal of time on, and accident prevention and survival is being stressed in all services. Accidents are preventable and the goal is, and should be, no deaths due to accidents.

My previous post looks at suicide, the second highest cause of non-hostile death. Please take a look at that post before deciding that the evil war is forcing people to kill themselves.