Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal...
by azernik on Thursday February 04, 2021 @11:46PM
(#26033238)
Fatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan.
e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.
My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a direct war between superpowers for the better part of a century. This sounds good, except it's possible we'll essentially wipe out the planet overnight because of a technical error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
I think we need a longer timespan to say whether or not wars are getting deadlier.