Service in Iraq: Just How Risky?,By Samuel H.
Preston and Emily Buzzell,Saturday, August 26, 2006; Page
A21www.washingtonpost.com
The consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom for U.S. forces are
being documented by the Defense Department with an exceptional
degree of openness and transparency. Its daily and cumulative
counts of deaths receive a great deal of publicity. But deaths
alone don't indicate the risk for an individual. For this purpose,
the number of deaths must be compared with the number of
individuals exposed to the risk of death. The Defense Department
has supplied us with appropriate data on exposure, and we take
advantage of it to provide the first profile of military mortality
in Iraq.
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.
The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that
observed in Iraq. Part of the reduction in the death rate is
attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things
as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to
wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq. Some other
factors to be considered:
Branch of service: Marines are paying the highest
toll in Iraq. Their death rate is more than double that of the
Army, 10 times higher than that of the Navy and 20 times higher
than for the Air Force. In fact, those in the Navy and Air Force
have substantially lower death rates than civilian men ages 20 to
34.
Among the Marines, there is in effect no difference in the
mortality risks for members on active duty and those in the
reserve. In the Army, on the other hand, reservists have 33 percent
of the death rate of those in active service because they are not
assigned to combat positions. Members of the Army National Guard
are intermediate in assignments and in mortality.
Rank: In both the Army and the Marines, enlisted
personnel have 40 percent higher mortality than officers. The
excess mortality of enlisted soldiers is diminished by the high
mortality of the lowest-ranking officers, lieutenants, who are
typically the leaders of combat patrols. Lieutenants have the
highest mortality of any rank in the Army, 19 percent higher than
all Army troops combined. Marine Corps lieutenants have 11 percent
higher mortality than all Marines. But the single highest-mortality
group in any service consists of lance corporals in the Marines,
whose death risk is 3.3 times that of all troops in Iraq.
Age, sex , race and ethnicity: In contrast to the
civilian population, mortality rates decline precipitously with
age. Troops ages 17 to 19 have a death risk 4.6 times that of those
50 and older. Differences in rank by age undoubtedly contribute to
this pattern, and so do differences in branch of service.
Sixty-five percent of Marine deployments to Iraq were of those age
24 or younger, compared with only 39 percent of Army deployments.
Women are not assigned to combat specialties in Iraq, although they
do see enemy fire; their death rate is 18 percent that of
men.
Identifying racial and ethnic differences in mortality is not
straightforward because the Defense Department uses a different
classification system for deaths than for deployments.
Nevertheless, all attempts we have made to reconcile the two
systems reach the same conclusion: Hispanics have a death risk
about 20 percent higher than non-Hispanics, and blacks have a death
risk about 30 to 40 percent lower than that of non-blacks. That low
death rate appears to result from an overrepresentation of blacks
in low-risk categories: For example, 19 percent of blacks in Iraq
are women, compared with 9 percent of non-blacks, while 7 percent
of blacks in Iraq are Marines, compared with 13 percent of
non-blacks.
Other casualties: The number of wounded in Iraq
through March 31, 2006, was 7.5 times the number of dead; the rate
at which wounds are incurred was one per 33 troops per year. We do
not have the same information about the characteristics of those
wounded as we have about those killed. But given the overwhelming
importance of hostile encounters in both wounds and deaths, it is
likely that variations in the risk of being wounded are quite
similar to those presented here.
Samuel H. Preston is the Frederick J. Warren professor of
demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Emily Buzzell is a
student in the Health and Societies Program at Penn.