U.S. Military Mortality in Iraq
Samuel H. Preston
Fredrick J. Warren Professor of Demography and Professor of Sociology
I think this is probably the only item in this series of 60-Second Lectures that was inspired by an undergraduate, Emily Buzzell, who is here with me today. Emily worked for me this summer. And her brother-in-law was stationed in Iraq, and she was curious about the risks that he faced. And so was I.
So she went online, and she found some terrific data, high-quality data, on deaths in Iraq. But we couldn’t do a mortality analysis without proper denominators. And here come the troops from Iraq right now. So I wrote to the Manpower Defense Corporation - I can hold onto this wire, I believe that’ll help - and we got denominators for death rates in a matter of days.
The first thing we did was to compare the mortality of troops in Iraq to the mortality in other populations, the most obvious of which is the U.S. population, civilian population. The death rate of troops in Iraq turns out to be lower than the death rate of the civilian population of America, which is rather shocking to people that think of it as an enormous risk. But there are parts of the American population with higher death rates. And I think the most frequently cited statistic from our paper is that African American men in Philadelphia, young African American men in Philadelphia actually have 11 percent higher death rate than our troops in Iraq.
We went on to study how mortality varies from characteristic to characteristic in Iraq. It turns out that Marines are paying the heaviest toll by far. They have more than double the death rate of Army troops, 10 times the death rate of Navy troops, and more than 20 times the death rate of people in the Air Force in Iraq. I talked to a spokesperson for the Marines in the Pentagon, and I asked him, “Are you aware of the high mortality of Marines in Iraq?” And he said, “Yes, but we try not to publicize it.” And I said, “Is that because you’re afraid it’ll hurt recruitment?” And he said, “No, we don’t want to embarrass the other services.” It was a badge of honor to have such a high death rate. Amazing.
Other characteristics associated with high mortality in Iraq are being young - young men have much higher death rates than older men by a factor of about eight; being recruited into the regular Army rather than the Reserve or the National Guard; being Hispanic, highest death rates of all; and being an enlisted man relative to being an officer. Not surprising.
We did a brief editorial for The Washington Post based upon this research. It got a lot of attention, I’m happy to say. It was the 19th most frequently blogged article - a new verb for me - the week that it was published. But I think the most disquieting response that we received was from a woman who worked for the Mortality Surveillance Branch of the U.S. military, who asked where we got our data.
Okay, so. I think one moral to the story is that there’s a great deal of data available on this fascinating world that we live in. And to make a contribution, sometimes all you have to do is to look for it. Thank you.