Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal...
by JohnBooty on Friday February 05, 2021 @08:10AM
(#26035884)
First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the
world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other
side of these conflicts?
Yeah and no. It's so hard to measure the human cost of war because so many of the deaths are indirect.
Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month.
Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII.
Second, the number of people who fought in each of these
wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct
comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per
month" rather than "deaths per month"?
It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth?
If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?"
If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well.
Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.
Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month.
Estimates of deaths from the Iraq War range from 150K "violent deaths" to 1mil "excess deaths" which would include all sorts of indirect causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII.
It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth?If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?"
If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well.
Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.