The issue should be to compare rates of injury and death from non-combat DEPLOYMENT versus combat related deployment. People do receive injuries and die in the military at a given rate regardless of where they are.

Stripping out the injuries and deaths that would normally occur from deployment anywhere, you can then determine what the effects are of the combat related injuries and deaths and compare them across other combat related deployments in US history. This has been done to some degree.

So far, Iraq has been generating injuries and deaths at the rate of approximately 1-3 deaths at most per day on average and the injury rate has been about seven injuries per fatality. This is much lower than previous wars if I remember articles about such statistics I read a couple years ago correctly. I was interested in this issue because of the conspiracy theories I cite below.

The advent of body armor and advances in medical treatment as well as the urban nature of this combat arena has rendered deaths fewer, but serious injuries more likely - because in earlier wars, serious injuries would likely have led to death.

In other words, we're having to treat more serious injuries for longer periods of time rather than just burying the soldier.

I don't think the issue is significant unless you are suspicious that large numbers of US deaths are going unreported. This has been a conspiracy theory for some time, with some people suggesting that up to 7,000 US troops have actually been killed so far in Iraq (and that was early last year I read that figure.)

This is unlikely because then either the injury figure would be incorrect - or we would have had around 50,000 injuries (again, as of early last year), and that could not go unnoticed. That would be nearly one third of the force in Iraq - again, that could not go unnoticed - especially when taking out one tenth of a military force is considered to be "decimation."

Some people have suspected that certain categories of US troops - notably, those immigrants who enlisted under the "Green Card" offer - have been underreported because they might not be considered US citizens or because their bodies would be shipped back to their families outside the US - or in some theories, not shipped back at all but just buried in mass graves in Iraq. I haven't seen any credible evidence for this as yet.

The last time I heard this theory was when a Palestinian reporter in Iraq was killed by US forces. His brother said that his brother had filmed the burial or mass graves of US troops in the desert that were unreported by the military, and that video was why he had been killed. The video has never surfaced, so there is no evidence.

Last year some of the less reputable Net sources (a clown named Walter Storch in particular) were claiming they actually had a death list of 7,000 US soldiers and that they would publish it and cross-reference it with the official US death list.

Never happened. So much for that theory.

There is an interesting summary of US wars here which includes an analysis of casualties.

Another article I found cites these statistics:

"As of March 2006, we have over 17,000 wounded military members who earned Purple Hearts in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When you add the number of wounded from Afghanistan the number grows by 685. The total U.S. military dead is 2,304 in Iraq and 282 in Afghanistan. At the current rate we will approach 3,000 war dead by the end of the year and over 21,000 combat wounded.

More American military members are surviving combat. For every American death in Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, nearly 7 survive with combat wounds. Nearly every one of those wounded will require access to medical care, many for the rest of their lives.

In World War II America had slightly over 292,000 combat deaths with nearly 671,000 wounded -- a ratio of approximately 2.3 wounded for every combat death. Vietnam saw American combat deaths at slightly over 47,000 with 353,000 combat wounded -- a ratio of about 3.2 wounded to every combat death.

Today warfighters have increased chances for survival in combat. For the ground forces, this can be directly linked to body armor. These Kevlar vests are stopping shrapnel and bullets as they protect the torso. These vests are responsible for more wounded returning home from combat injuries in the history of U.S. wars."

Another issue is that according to one report, more than one in four Iraqi vets returning require some sort of physical or mental health medical assistance from the VA.

A Wikipedia article on Iraq casualties indicates the following as well:

"In addition, the study on posttraumatic stress disorder found that the percentage of troops suffering from PTSD increased by between 7-10% after deployment to Iraq, which would represent 25,000 to 35,000 initial periodcases of PTSD among the roughly 350,000 U.S. troops who have served in Iraq."

This article indicates that the British MOD has been concealing injury rates. It was basically discovered when the rates worked out to 1:3 rather than the 1:7 reported for the US forces.

Well as one example in WW1 there were great numbers of deaths from disease. Are we to start not counting those casualties as well? Seems to me like this (combat vs non combat distinction) is an exercise in real-time revisionism for the purpose of undercounting the human cost of this war.

There's a typo in your citation.

The number of wounded for Vietnam is 153,000, not 353,000.

Regarding non-combat deaths in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe the U.S. Government does not want to provide any statistics on these deaths because it will, in fact, increase the number of deaths that the media will report on. There have been several generals and DOD spokespersons who have stated that the government does not keep those kinds of statistics but those statements, even though they might be correct, are at best deception at the highest levels of government to keep the "numbers" down. I worked in Information Technology in the Air Force and I had the capability to run queries against numerous databases and I could create reports for upper management on just about anything they wanted. The various military personnel centers in DOD have databases that maintain information regarding where and when a military person died and whether it was a combat or a non-combat death. It would be extremely easy to create such a report.

Here is a link to BBC that shows UK's deaths and they are broken down into the two categories. Why is it that UK can provide these statistics and we cannot or will not.

My main objection is that a soldier who died in a non-combat jeep rollover or a sailer who might have taken his own life or an airman who had a heart attack - all in Iraq died because they were in Iraq and each deserves to be counted. They were all there because of the war and they all should be counted because they did not come back to join their loved one's - except to be buried.

Here is the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/4665020.stm

Note: the breakdown is at the bottom of the article.