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Originally posted by boots: Is the 103 number actually dead soldiers or casualties? The military counts injured as casualty as well. So the 50 number that was in the US media was not dead. it was about 40 known injured and 10 dead. Casualty numbers from the military, then, need to be broken down before we can make sense of them. |
What's the betting that the Hong Kong papers are using Iraqi statistics? Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with an independent news agency using either side's numbers. It's just that based on the last Gulf War, those Iraq statistics tend to be a little inflated.
US casualty figures for our own side tend to be pretty accurate. Our military has good command and control, and excellent communications. So the figure reported up to commanders tends to be pretty accurate - especially when you are talking small numbers. Then we also have an independent media that checks the numbers of coffins returning to the families against the official figures. With local media reporting each casualty it would be hard to hide casualties 2x the official figure. Again, this is easier to verify when you are talking small numbers such as these. Iraq does not have either good military communications, or an independent media. I'd therefore take their numbers with a huge pinch of salt.
Secondly, it is inherently easier to count your own casualties than the enemy's because you know who you had, and who you lost. Much of the distrust of US figures comes from the wildly optimistic "body counts" of the Vietnam war when the enemy often was shot at without even being properly seen. But the wildly inaccurate estimates were of enemy casualties, not American.