I’ve long assumed that casualties we suffered in Iraq was around 4000 personnel. Yet lately I’ve been reading on the internet that the counting or the way they count casualties has been purposely smudged to lower the count. Now I know there are a lot of inaccurate info on the web so I’m asking my fellow dopers what is your opinion on this.
Casualty = dead and wounded in action ( also losses to disease ). So total U.S. dead in Iraq by 2016 was 4,424. But total casualties including wounded in action was 36,376.
Casualties suffered by the Iraqis should be relevant to a comprehensive humanitarian evaluation. Many studies find that at least one Million Iraqis died as a direct result of Bush’s invasion and the turmoils it caused, with several Millions more left homeless.
I’m perturbed when casualty accounting includes only American lives. We see this myopic calculus even from people who claim that “the purpose of the invasion was to help the people of Iraq.”
This brings up the problem of the past influencing how we view the present.
The more important number is the wounded, but it gets less attention. Perhaps that is what you have been reading about.
For a long time combat deaths as a fraction of all combat wounded remained fairly stable. Roughly:
WW II 30%
Korea 25%
Vietnam 24%
Gulf War I 24%
Gulf War II 10%
This was accomplished by, according to Dr. Atul Gawande who wrote about this in his book “Better”-excellent book BTW, by simply making modern medicine more efficient and goal directed. Things like wounded soldiers were evacuated to battlefield Forward Surgical Teams where the soldier was operated on just enough to keep him alive, then sent back to better equipped hospitals still sedated with the surgical incision still open-covered with a plastic bandage. That way severely injured patients remained alive long enough to get comprehensive medical care.
So the numbers you read about may not be fudged, but they are misleading if you try to compare them to other conflicts.
As has been said many times, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. One has to know the background any time numbers are thrown around. Even fudging is hard to pin down. 
And as another poster mentioned, casualties by the Iragis can’t be ignored-but often are by Americans. And even there, to a much smaller extent, American improvements in the local healthcare system saved a lot of lives. The Americans gave the Iraqi medical system a lot of supplies, money and training. While at the same time using far more lethal weapons which caused a lot more severe injuries. It didn’t balance out, but the aid helped.
Since the OP is asking for opinions, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The fact civilians pretty universally assume “casualty” = “dead soldier” when it means nothing of the sort doesn’t help.
Yes, there’s always a bit of hairsplitting about which deaths or injuries in a combat zone that aren’t directly obviously immediately caused by enemy violence are treated as combat deaths and which are simply deaths in theater. But that’s nuance points around the edge.
I wonder what the OP thinks are the “true” high numbers and what he/she thinks are the “massaged” low numbers? Knowing those will tell us a lot about where the source of the discrepancy lies.
Thanks. That’s very interesting. I’d always been under the impression that advancements in body armor had also helped reduce the number of deaths. Did the book address that at all?
How do you define casualty is also pertinent. Many militaries don’t count the guys who get minor wounds, get patched up and return to unit. The Soviets used to divide non Faran casualty into “needs medical treatment” and “irrecoverable”; later meant soldier would not be able to return to combat… I think they meant a longer than a set timeframe of absence rather than it meaning "never ". This is one of the reason for the wildly differing estimates of casualties seen in descriptions of battles.
The 50,000 casualty number for Iraq and Afghanistan does not include the near 100,000 PTSD treatments and 250,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries. ( The Cost of War Includes at Least 253,330 Brain Injuries and 1,700 Amputations | WIRED )
Absolutely.
Dr. Gawande describes in detail how the doctors in-country maintained extensive records on injuries that were immediately fed back to the chain of command. To cite two examples, early in the war the doctors noted an uptick in chest wounds. Turns out soldiers were getting careless with their body armor. Command put the onus on the sergeants and company commanders to make sure the body armor was worn at all times and the chest injuries dropped. For another, there were more eye injuries than expected, investigation found that the safety glasses initially issued were considered by the young soldiers to look like the kind Florida retired grandmothers wore. Switching to cool looking wrap-around glasses significantly reduced eye injuries. I am sure other people identified these issues as well, but after all it is a book about problem solving with medicine as the source of examples.
More than body armor or any new advanced technology, the simple tourniquet deserves most of the credit. Specifically, it’s been changes in basic medical techniques such as an emphasis on tourniquet use as a first-resort as opposed to a last resort, as well as the issuing of a tourniquet to every soldier instead of just medics that has resulted in the drastic reduction in deaths vs casualties.
that is interesting! Makes sense. You would think that a basic step like that would have been thought of and implemented-oh say 100 years ago… 
Though it might not have been as effective in the world wars because soldiers couldn’t be brought to aid stations as quickly. But still, it would have helped.
ISTM part of that is recognizing that although they’re far from ideal, modern prostheses and reconstructive surgery work pretty good.
The old calculus on tourniquet use was “Surely lose a limb; maybe save a life.” When the lose a limb was a truly terrible lifelong outcome and the maybe save a life part was pretty low odds, the balance favored using tourniquets as a last resort, which often meant too little too late.
Losing a limb is still no happy picnic, but it’s a lot better now than it was in, say, 1943. And, as you say, the maybe save a life part is a lot more likely to pay off these days. So the balance of benefits tilts the other way.
I am shocked that TBIs aren’t counted as wounded in action. According to the article 77% of them are regarded as “mild”.
That was for an eleven year period (so a bit longer than for the previous figure).