Stat wars

The Belmont Club:

The Washington Post looks at the statistical danger of duty in Iraq. The article, written by a Professor of Demography at the University of Pennsylvania, begins by comparing the risk of death in Iraq with other situations. What's not captured in this comparison is the danger of wounds. It would be interesting to line up the risk of say, losing a single limb in a civilian situation would be to an equivalent event in Iraq. But for deaths the situation is as follows:

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Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 "person-years" in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.

How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq. The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 -- 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

However, what really affects the risk of dying is not so much location -- being in Iraq versus not being in Iraq -- so much as what a person might be doing. All other things being equal the risk of death is largely borne by the ground forces. In particular, although the Wapo article doesn't say it, by people in the combat arms. Unsurprisingly, the highest risk is borne by young men in ground combat specialties.

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So, is it time to withdraw from Philadelphia? Or is the anti war left's caterwalling about Iraq about something other than concern for our troops? Isn't their real concern their real objection one to the use of force and the fear that we might be successful in using force?

It is the lieutenants and the lance corporals who are bearing the brunt of this war and they are all volunteers who are doing it because they believe in the mission and it is the people who want the mission to fail who use their deaths as a prop for their policy postions against the mission, and the statistics will not hinder their emotional judgement.

Ultimately, they want to lose and they will do what ever it takes to lose, while brave men are doing whatever it takes to win. There is much more to Wretchard's analysis of these statistics.

There is more discussion on this story at Redstate and Blue Crab Boulevard. To answer Blue Crabs question about the high number of hispanic deaths, I think it is tied to the high number of Marine lance corporals who are hispanic.