Listening to a Diane Rehm podcast about returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The statistics show that the majority of these soldiers are basically screwed. One in five vets have one of these diagnoses; around 40% of them receive treatment.
Quick show of hands in the audience: how many people are surprised by this? Aside, of course, from administration planners.
Putting this into some raw numbers: according to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, 1.5 million troops have served in those wars. Using the specific percentages from the podcast, that means 240,000 soldiers with PTSD, and 240,000 more with depression; 105,000 have both diagnoses and are counted in each of the above figures, for a total of 300,000 veterans suffering from mental illness as a result of their deployment. 180,000 go undiagnosed or untreated. (No, the numbers don’t add up; I’m extrapolating from percentages in the podcast which have the same discrepancy.)
Personally, this is one of the things that made the $3 trillion cost of the Iraq war plausible to me; the 300,000 with potentially debilitating mental illnesses is only one of many long-term effects of the war that tend to be overlooked by the many Americans who were gung-ho about opening a can of whoop-ass on our enemies. And that’s really the issue here — having built the most powerful military in human history, a cursory reading of the last sixty years shows that Americans are damned comfortable with using it, certainly more comfortable than our self-image as peaceful would imply.
I think it’s well past time that we teach ourselves about the human costs of war. Never mind the 84,000 civilian casualties in Iraq; our tin ear to the suffering of foreigners is probably not going to change in the near future. But we certainly care about American casualties.
So next time, just for a lark, wouldn’t it be interesting if the American people demanded an accounting from an administration about what the statistical results are likely to be from going to war? We have six years of data from these wars; it shouldn’t be much of a leap to be able to say that if we send 100,000 soldiers into combat, we can expect N deaths, lifelong injuries, and mental disorders resulting. The 1.5 million figure above includes combat and noncombat positions; the odds of both injury and mental illness directly correlate, obviously, to combat exposure. We certainly collect specific data on combat casualties, and can use these when considering future deployments. Improvements in medical techniques between wars serve to both reduce the number of combat deaths, and increase the number of lifelong injuries; for these reasons, an accurate estimate should include both predictions based on past statistical results, as well as trendline modifiers for new techniques.
In this war, of course, any such predictions offered by the DoD would have been remarkably rosy, as their original plans were to roundtrip the troops there and back in under a year. But such predictions were never made; no one ever said, “For every 1,000 troops we send, 200 are coming home mentally ill, 21 are coming home wounded, and three come home on their shields.”
If such predictions had been made based on Gulf War I, the numbers would be far lower for killed and wounded in action — although long-term disability numbers are substantively similar. The Vietnam KIA and WIA equivalents are 22/1,000 and 117/1,000 respectively. Perhaps there might have been greater introspection upon the shift from a “shock and awe” war to one of occupation, if the shift from lower towards higher ratios were remembered as possible consequences.
What I do remember about the runup to war was talk of the financial cost we’d bear — numbers that were also laughably low and, to be charitable, optimistic. (To be accurate, lies and malfeasance.) Sure, there was plenty of vague talk about troop casualties, in that sort of “gee, it’s awful” tone we use about such things. I expect that my analysis here is extremely amateurish compared to the casualty estimates that they have at the Pentagon for any given military action, and these numbers should be made public and part of a public debate about any future war we consider. Some wars will still be self-evidently worth their predicted cost, but for others, perhaps it might be worth teaching America just what it takes to open up the can of whoop-ass.
First: stipulated that this is all bad news, and that more should be done. No argument there.
But, questions:
First, not having listened to the podcast, is that 180,000 untreated or 180,000 unfunded by the federal government? There’s a big difference, and some of that difference might explain why some of these treatments aren’t funded.
Second, I notice you didn’t produce comparative results for World War II. Not to Godwin the discussion from the outset, but if the KIA/WIA ratios were too high in that case, would you agree that it wasn’t a war worth fighting?
In more general terms: no discussion that is purely about the cost of war will ever generate support for the war. To generate support, you need to discuss the benefits as well as the costs. Our media & political climate these days encourages the under-reporting of costs (when was the last time the cost of building a bridge was estimated correctly, let alone fighting a war), and discourages any discussion of the benefits as fear-mongering and/or “lies and malfeasance.”
I’ve pitched the budgets on too many projects to be shocked when my government highlights the benefits and downplays the costs to get something done. Best we can hope for is that they honestly believed their posturing had the best interests of the country behind it. That, of course, is an unknowable fact (and the point, by the way, that Scott McClelland made in his book, which was distilled down to “Bush-bashing” by every pundit in America).
Third, and slightly off topic, I’m somewhat amused that iraqbodycount.org is now publishing 87,000 civilians deaths. Back in 2004, similar agencies were publishing numbers like 100,000 and in 2006, the numbers were as high as 650,000 (link to source). I guess half a million people were just hiding from the researchers at Lancet…
is that 180,000 untreated or 180,000 unfunded by the federal government?
The direct quote is “untreated.” It’s unclear what provisions there are for private care, or if government funding is available for such.
Second, I notice you didn’t produce comparative results for World War II.
Two reasons: 1) WWII is pretty much in its own class in terms of warfare, and 2) the gap from WWII to Vietnam was the industrial revolution of battlefield medicine, so I don’t think the two are appropriately comparable.
if the KIA/WIA ratios were too high in that case, would you agree that it wasn’t a war worth fighting?
Cf. “in its own class”. WWII was the only “hot” war of the 20th century that genuinely threatened the existence of the United States; had we not gotten involved, it’s unlikely that a Third Reich victorious in Europe and most of Asia would have stopped at the oceans.
To generate support, you need to discuss the benefits as well as the costs. Our media & political climate these days encourages the under-reporting of costs
Right. It’s my contention that the media discussed the benefits endlessly (and erroneously), while not discussing the costs whatsoever. I think it’s also worth noting that a country that is hypervigilant about “supporting the troops” in meaningless ways is comfortable being largely ignorant about the cost to the troops of going to war.
Best we can hope for is that they honestly believed their posturing had the best interests of the country behind it. That, of course, is an unknowable fact
I think it’s fairly well established that administration remained, at the very least, deliberately ignorant of the many points of view brought up by our own intelligence services that the war’s aftermath would be what it was. I also think that it strains credulity to say that people who are theoretically intelligent would remain so ignorant, which is why I’m comfortable saying that the neoconservatives deliberately got us into this in order to remake the world in their own image—at which they have been largely successful regardless of whether the war itself was a success.
I’m somewhat amused that iraqbodycount.org is now publishing 87,000 civilians deaths. Back in 2004, similar agencies were publishing numbers like 100,000 and in 2006, the numbers were as high as 650,000
Actually, I had you in mind when I cited that source. Personally, I’m convinced by the medical and public health research that went into the Lancet figures of hundreds of thousands dead, but I’m tired of arguing public health methodologies that go into creating that figure. Iraqbodycount.org simply creates a tally from the daily reports; each individual figure that goes into the total is not disputed (although many reports are vague, hence the spread of 8,000 in their total). IBC does not include the Lancet numbers of, say, people who died from the collapse of the medical system or other infrastructural losses. Hence, I think IBC’s number should be seen as a very conservative floor for war dead, and I expect that if there ever is a stable Iraqi government to create a retroactive census number, the Lancet’s figure will turn out to be the more accurate ballpark.