Jeff Edwards is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer, and an Anti-Submarine Warfare Specialist. He is currently working as a civilian expert consultant to the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, the Navy's think tank for high-tech undersea warfare. His naval career spanned more than two decades and half the globe -- from chasing Soviet nuclear attack submarines during the Cold War, to launching cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf.
He puts his extensive experience as a Surface
Warfare specialist to work in his new novel,
TORPEDO.
In a plot that could easily be ripped from
today's headlines, TORPEDO combines an accident
at a nuclear power plant, an illegal arms
deal, and a biological warfare attack, to
ignite a crisis that could draw Western Europe,
the Middle East, and the United States into
all-out war. TORPEDO mixes the elements of
a classic sea chase novel with state-of-the-art
technology to create a cutting-edge Surface
Warfare Thriller.
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By Jeff Edwards
I watched the news a few evenings ago. The top story was the spiraling death toll among U.S. troops in Iraq. A prominent broadcast journalist spoke in solemn tones about the number of deaths since the start of the war, which he estimated at 1,353. He continued at great length to point out the tremendous human cost of our efforts in Iraq, and ended with the rather heavy implication that America should have avoided Iraq entirely because our mission there is too difficult, and too dangerous.
As I watched the remainder of the news program, I realized that most reporters have made little (if any) effort to realistically assess the cost of the military conflict in Iraq. They latch onto the latest estimate of American fatalities (1,358 as of this writing) and brandish it as proof of how desperately awry the Iraqi situation has gone. After all, if more than thirteen hundred American Soldiers are dead, we must be taking a horrible beating. And, by extension of that logic, we must be losing the fight.
I hear the same ideas echoed by people on the street every day. If we’ve lost this many troops, we cannot possibly be winning the conflict in Iraq. Most of the time, I let it pass. I don’t have time or the inclination to give a history lesson to everyone who accepts the media’s assessment at face value. Instead, I ask a simple question. How do our losses in Iraq compare to our losses in past military actions? Almost invariably, I get a blank stare in response. People have no idea. They simply take it for granted that our losses are astronomically high because that’s what the nice man on television said.
Despite the initial stun value of my question, it’s really not very difficult to compare our losses in Iraq to those from our combat actions of the past. The Department of Veterans Affairs maintains records on wartime military losses. They’re accessible via the Internet to anyone with a computer, and in print for people on the short side of the digital divide. Figures for the current conflict are available on the Department of Defenses public website. (By the way, the DOD site includes the numbers for non-combat deaths, personnel wounded in action, and many of the other figures that conspiracy theorists think the government is trying to conceal.)
The fact of the matter is, the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq have been incredibly low. People look at me funny when I say this, but our troop fatalities have been so low that they’re almost statistically anomalous. Look it up. Do the math. The records are public.
In World War I, an average of 2,810 American Soldiers died in combat every month. That’s not the total death toll for the war; that’s the average number of U.S. combat deaths every month. We lost 53,402 men over the entire 19-month duration of America’s involvement.
During World War II, we were engaged in combat operations for a little over 44 months. An average of 6,626 American service members lost their lives every month. Yes, I said every month. Total losses for the war are calculated at 291,557 - over a quarter of a million American lives.
By the Korean conflict, troop fatalities were down to about 910 a month. In Vietnam, the numbers were down even further: an average of 526 losses per month.
The first Gulf War lasted about a month. We lost 148 service members. That was by far the lowest combat fatality rate since we’ve been keeping records. Many military experts considered that number to be freakishly low, in view of the scale of combat operations and the nature and strength of the enemy forces arrayed against us. More than a few pundits offered the opinion that we’d never be able to pull off another major combat operation with losses as low as 148 deaths per month.
And yet, that weirdly low figure was more than twice as high as our current losses in Iraq. In the twenty months since U.S. forces rolled onto Iraqi soil, we have lost an average of 68 lives a month. I literally cannot find historical precedent for losses that low.
I’m not making light of the losses we’ve suffered. Each and every one of those deaths is an incalculable tragedy. Each and every one represents a father, a mother, a sister, a son, or a daughter who will never come home: a piece of the future lost for all time. These deaths are all important, and they are all tragic. But so is the loss of every firefighter who rushes into a burning building to save a child, and every police officer who steps into the path of death to protect the innocent.
Our ability to wage war has improved so drastically that it has created unrealistic expectations on the part of our media, and the American public. When casualty counts were through the roof, the American people seemed to understand that war is an incredibly dangerous business. They expected casualties. But the casualty has dropped so dramatically that many people are beginning to think that war can be fought without loss of life.
On December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly 1,200 American Sailors lost their lives aboard the battleship USS Arizona. The losses aboard that one ship in a single battle were nearly equal to the total number of U.S. casualties suffered thus far in Iraq.
The cost of bringing freedom to Iraq is high. I don’t deny that for a second, and I don’t pretend that mere numbers tell the complete tale. But the simple truth is - in terms of American casualties - this has been by far the least costly war we’ve ever fought. Any suggestion that we are paying some never-before-seen price is nothing short of ludicrous.
Despite everything I’ve said here, I’m confident that tomorrow evening I’ll turn on my television and see a journalist or military expert offering our casualty count as evidence that we are losing the struggle in Iraq. On my way to work, I’ll meet at least one person who buys into that argument, in blatant contradiction of established fact. I’ll bite my tongue, if I can manage it. If not, I’ll find myself educating yet another stranger on the history and scale of American warfare.
