Uzbekistan Eyewitnesses See Dozens of US Casualties

[Petro]

On Monday, December 17, 2001, at 09:17 AM, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
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.

	Depends on the soldier and the "war" they are fighting.

	Not all soldiers fight for honors, and some units 
understand/believe that certain fights in certain places are worth not 
getting all that much attention. I'm not saying that in *this* war that 
would happen, there is no need. The American public knows we are in this 
war, and they understand that there will be some casualties.
>
> 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?

	Because in Korea and Vietnam we were fighting the enemies fight 
with largely the the same level of technology (yes, we had better 
technology, but not *that* much better).

	We are also fighting smarter these days.

> 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.

	Not that I disagree much with this, but there is also the issue 
that the American public is much more sensitive to losses than in Korea 
or Vietnam. "We" are not  as naive as we used to be, and we don't trust 
Uncle nearly as much.

	This makes those at the top more careful about objectives and methods.


--
"Remember, half-measures can be very effective if all you deal with are
half-wits."--Chris Klein