-- On 13 Dec 2001, at 7:04, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
Once again I am seeing eyewitness reports claiming more U.S. Casualties. Yet I don't see simular reports in the U.S. Press confirming or denying these claims.
James A. Donald:
The dogs bark but the caravan moves on. In the US, unlike most other countries, there is still sufficient freedom of speech that soldiers cannot go missing without it becoming widely known. The US army does underreport wounded, and minimize the severity of wounds, but dead is dead.
On 16 Dec 2001, at 22:48, Petro wrote:
Of course, sometimes soldiers who die in a place they weren't supposed to be come up missing in "training accidents" somewhere else.
The US, unlike the countries whose system so many prefer to impose on the US, has sufficient freedom of speech that that cannot happen without causing grave embarrassment. Recollect that dying in battle gives very different honors, compensation etc. If if the army falsified the circumstances of a soldier's death there would be mutiny in the ranks. CIA deaths can go unreported, and probably usualy do. Army deaths cannot, because of a system designed to encourage and recognize valor. The low death rates in recent conflicts have made some people suspicious. How can the US army get casualty ratio of something like ten thousand to one, when fighting against people with comparable weapons? And if the US is made of supermen, why did it suffer heavy casualties in Vietnam and Korea? In my judgment the big change is the change from a conscript army, a slave army, to a warrior army. Firstly this makes the soldiers more valuable to the officers, since deaths cost the army big money. Every casualty means that the pay and benefits have to be considerably higher. In a free market, the burden of hazardous employment falls on the employer, so the employer has an incentive to provide safe employment. Secondly, the apparatus of coercion that attempts to force conscripts to fight against their will frequently forces them into danger that a competent warrior would never have gone into, or would promptly have left. With warrior armies, the losing side typically suffers almost one hundred percent of the casualties. These absurdly lopsided casualty rates have been normal throughout much of the last few thousand years of history. These recent figures do not indicate the US army is composed of supermen, merely that recent wars have been victorious, and that the US army is now composed of warriors. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG YdA+jxja9u2mKh/t/7M4RTS4WDWB5rB/ToGn2IIw 4IMbW6YIQXFRZY9lKCF8rMgIXbX/hM/6Gg0dg0Zjb