U.S. Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever

According to WaPo, the war in Iraq has the lowest ever casualty rate among American wars.

Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.

Predictably, though, the article has to counter that piece of good news with something that should make every good and just citiizen think about the ravages of war.

But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The takehome point here is that fighting in modern wars is not a death sentence in the way that nearly every movie portrays. While combat operations have not gotten any less dangerous (though their effectiveness has increased by various technological factors), the after combat care has become much better. That improvement must count for something, right? Depends on whom you ask, you say?