When Sophistry Attacks

There is a certain lobby in this country that has to make of every military venture "A New Vietnam." It seems damn near congenital with some of these people. In the Washington Post piece The Costs of Staying the Course a Berkeley academic (gee, what a surprise) makes the case that despite the relatively low casualty rate in Iraq this conflict is just like Vietnam. Maybe worse.

On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. Adjusted for the size of the armed forces, the average daily number of killed and wounded was 4.8 times as many in World War II than in Iraq, but it was only 0.25 times greater in Vietnam -- or one-fourth more.

First things first, his numbers are wrong. For example, in Vietnam the US suffered 47,378 Killed In Action and 304,704 Wounded In Action. This comes to 6.44 wounded for every fatality, not 2.6. Even if you add in all the Missing In Action (2338) and non-combat deaths (10,824) the ratio only comes down to around 5.01 wounded per fatality. (source) And even this number is unfair because it doesn't account for non-combat related injuries which would push the ratio higher again, and makes his "estimate" of 3,500 combat deaths meaningless.

His discussion of comparative size differences between forces in Vietnam and Iraq is similarly wrong. The size of the US Military in the Vietnam era was 3.5 million and the top troop levels in Vietnam reached 543,482, so roughly 1 out of every 6.5 Vietnam era military personnel served in Vietnam at its peak. In Iraq roughly 1 out of every 8.2 military personnel are serving (170,000 out of 1.4 million). This number seems to be roughly equal to the average ratio for the Vietnam era. So any difference in casulty rates are not explained there. At peak deployment levels Vietnam had 3.2 times the amount of personnel in theater (540,000 to 170,000) as opposed to Iraq, but they suffered 7.5 times the rates of casulties (15 per day, as opposed to 2 per day in Iraq). The difference in percentage is not 25% as the article claims , but over 200%.

Some people are just gonna have to face it, whatever it is, Iraq is Iraq, not Vietnam.