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Comment by ttraub | Hacker News Reader

Even in modern warfare, with its surgical accuracy to pinpoint and take out specific targets, hundreds if not thousands of troops will still die in the course of a major engagement, counting tactical errors, accidents, and friendly fire incidents.

It's a sobering thought and one that makes me glad we're disengaging from foreign conflicts. War is hell.

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We really have no concept of what a real shooting war looks like. Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. The generation that was alive during Vietnam is dying out.

I'm from a backwoods area that disproportionately sends recruits to the military, and I don't know anybody from the dozens who went over there that actually fired any shots in anger. The fobbit-fighter ratio is pretty absurd.

It would seem that our soldiers current experience would be most like that of the British Army soldiers of the late-Victorian era from the Crimean War to the Boer War, when they were largely engaged in policing the colonies of the British Empire in mostly small scale and guerrilla engagements.

Is there a literature from ordinary British soldiers forming "the thin red line"?

Kipling is probably unreliable. "Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? / But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll,"

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british...

> Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine.

That's an exaggeration. Iraq 2003-2009 suffered around half the deaths of France 1914-1918.

WW I, most deaths in a single day: ~30,000

WW I, total deaths from France, cvilians and military: ~1,400,000

Iraq invasion: ~200,000 verified violent civilian death. Total estimations are 2x-5× that number.

These figures were from Wikipedia. From memory, a few comparison points with other Middle East wars were the USA had a minor role (a military minor role, since I doubt Saudi Arabia and UAE would have invaded Yemen if the USA had not provided their full support):

Yemen (2015-): ~100,000 deaths. 10 millions suffer from hunger.

Syria (2011-): ~300,000 deaths

I'm speaking from a decidedly US-centric point of view. Total deaths in all combat theaters from all causes for the US military is on the order of 11000 dead from the first boots on the ground in Afghanistan to today.

France, WW1: ~1,700,000 civilian and military (1.4M is military alone.); ~4.3% of its population. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties)

Iraq's population in 2002 was about 25,000,000 (France in 1911 was 39,000,000); ~650,000 excess deaths (2003-2006, the most I could find in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War) is about 2.6% of the population.

Americans have been carefully conditioned to count only American casualties.

The number of people killed or mauled in recent wars is so horrendous that any American complaining of unpleasantness should be ashamed.

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