America's Military Population

Mortality

While military personnel die from most of the same causes as do civilians of similar ages, their jobs put them at a unique risk of dying in the conduct of war. Military deaths increase during wartime-though many do not occur in combat but from accidents or illnesses related to the mobilization. American wartime fatalities during World War I and World War II exceeded 115,000 and 400,000, respectively.6 While combat deaths often do not account for the majority of military deaths during wartime, they are the most dramatic and visible cause. The largest number of combat fatalities-almost 300,000-was associated with the largest U.S. military mobilization, World War II; the second-largest number-more than 50,000-was associated with the second-largest mobilization, World War I (see Table 2, page 14). The relationship between size of mobilization and number of combat fatalities seems to break down with the Korean and Vietnam wars. The Korean War lasted for a little over three years, June 1950 to July 1953. American involvement in the Vietnam War, by contrast, lasted eight and a half years, from the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964 to the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. Peak strength during the Vietnam War was 543,400, in April 1969, while peak strength in Korea was 325,270, in July 1953.

As a function of troop strength, annual combat fatalities were lower in Vietnam than in Korea. This decline was reflected in the deadliest battles of these wars. In the deadliest Korean War engagement, the battle of the Pusan Perimeter, in August and September 1950, the United States lost 3,603 soldiers. By contrast, Vietnam's deadliest battle, in the Ia Drang Valley in October and November 1965, caused only 300 fatalities.7

Through the Vietnam War, war deaths numbered in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The technology and strategy by which America wages wars changed drastically in the late 20th century, substituting capital-in the form of long-range highly lethal weapons-for labor, and combat fatalities have fallen markedly.8 The 1991 Persian Gulf War saw even more dramatic decreases in combat deaths, because of a greater reliance on American air power and use of increasingly precise long-range munitions, such as cruise missiles. U.S. combat deaths in the more recent war in Iraq were below the total for the Gulf War when President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, 2003. However, continuing military actions brought the combat death toll in Iraq to 857 by the end of October 2004, more than five times the total for the first Gulf War.

Most military deaths are not combat related (see Figure 5). Mortality rates in the American military are lower than the general population because military personnel are younger and healthier than the average American. Servicemen and women undergo a rigorous health screening prior to induction or commissioning, and they have access to the largest health care delivery system in the world. In the early 1980s, there were slightly more than 110 deaths per 100,000 active-duty personnel per year, and the trend has been generally downward, albeit with dramatic reversals during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War, and from 2001 to 2002 (the most recent data available by cause), reflecting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequent military operations. The percentage of military deaths due to hostile action or terrorist attacks has not exceeded 1 percent, except in 1983, when a Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed; in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War; and in 2001, when the Pentagon was attacked on Sept. 11.