Remembrance of the people who didn’t come home is a standard element of war memorials, but, for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, it is the central theme. There, inscribed on the black granite wall, are the names of more than 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam.

The casualties are still starkly remembered today. Part of the reason was their unprecedented visibility. Vietnam was the first war we watched on television. It was a forerunner of what would later be called “the CNN effect.”

Casualties in Vietnam were low compared with previous wars. The worst was the Civil War, with nearly 620,000 military dead—360,000 Union, 258,000 Confederate—the total of battle deaths and deaths from other causes, such as disease. More than 15 percent of those who served died in the war. Never again, not even in World War II, did our casualty rate rise to such a level.

Carnage in the two World Wars was devastating. In The Face of Battle, historian John Keegan recounts how the British took 419,654 casualties at the Somme in 1916. There were 60,000 casualties the first day, “of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes.”

Until recently, heavy casualties were presumed to be an inevitable consequence of warfare. It was not until the Gulf War of 1991 that another possibility began to emerge.

Prior to the Gulf War, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that the casualties would reach 15,000. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of coalition forces, estimated 5,000.

That didn’t happen. Operation Desert Storm consisted of an extraordinarily effective 38-day air campaign that left the enemy reeling, followed by a four-day air–land finale.

Iraq’s command and control was eliminated the first night. By the time the ground offensive began, about half of Iraq’s armor had been destroyed, and between 50 and 75 percent of the troops in the first two echelons were killed or captured, or had deserted.

Total casualties for the coalition were 247 battle deaths (148 for the US, 99 for the allies) and 901 wounded (467 for the US, 434 for the allies).

Was the Gulf War a turning point in the history of warfare, or was it a fluke? Gen. John Michael Loh, commander of Tactical Air Command, said in 1992 that the American public had a new standard of expectations, that the US armed forces would “win quickly, decisively, with overwhelming advantage, and with few casualties.”

A New Way of War

In 1996, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman said the nation was on the verge of “a new American way of war.”

“America has not only the opportunity but the obligation to transition from a concept of annihilation and attrition warfare that places thousands of young Americans at risk in brute, force-on-force conflicts to a concept that leverages our sophisticated military capabilities to achieve US objectives by applying what I like to refer to as an ‘asymmetric force’ strategy,” he said.

Instead of engaging the enemy in what Fogleman called “a bloody slugfest on the ground,” US forces could put greater reliance on their advantages in information superiority and precision strike.

The improvement in airpower was especially significant.

In World War II, the circular error probable—the standard Air Force measure of bombing effectiveness—for a B-17 dropping gravity bombs was 3,300 feet. It took a lot of bombs to be sure of hitting the target.

In the Vietnam War, the CEP was 400 feet. By the Gulf War, it was down to 10 feet. A single stealthy aircraft could penetrate the defenses and achieve, with two laser guided bombs, what would have taken 1,000 sorties in World War II or 30 sorties in Vietnam.

That made it possible to focus the attack, striking with great accuracy and economy. Fewer of our forces would be exposed to enemy fire, and the increased precision meant less collateral damage.

The air war over Serbia in 1999, operations in Afghanistan since 2001, and the opening rounds of Gulf War II supplied further evidence of a new way of war. The operations were highly successful, and the casualties were low.

US forces had zero combat losses in Kosovo and Serbia. After a year and a half, the total dead in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Middle East, the Philippines, and elsewhere was 76.

Before Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, there were predictions of as many as 5,000 US troops killed and up to 30,000 total US casualties. (At the other end of the forecasting spectrum was the expectation that it would be a “cakewalk.”)

Apprehension grew as the operation got under way. On March 24, after just five days of war, an editorial in USA Today proclaimed that “Mounting US Casualties Dispel Modern War Myths.” It said that the losses “can’t help but test the public’s resolve,” but might: “knock down a dangerous conceit of the antiseptic war.” At that point in the fighting, known US losses, both those killed in action and in accidents, were 20.

When Baghdad fell on April 9—the 21st day of the conflict—the total of US dead was just over 100.

In April, Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used the same phrase as Fogleman—“a new American way of war”—to describe Operation Iraqi Freedom. Myers said that precision and focus had allowed US, British, and Australian forces to “strike directly at the heart of the regime” in Iraq while minimizing collateral damage and harm to the Iraqi people.

The Napoleonic Model

The evolution of casualty rates in warfare is a function of changes in both military technology and in strategic concepts of operation.

After 1800, war had generally followed the Napoleonic model. The objective was destruction of the enemy’s army in the field and occupation of his country. “I see only one thing, namely the enemy’s main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves,” Napoleon said.

Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian officer and famed military theorist, based his views largely on his analysis of the Napoleonic Wars. “Of all the possible aims in war, the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces always appears as the highest,” Clausewitz said in On War (1832), adding that “destruction of the enemy forces is the overriding principle of war.”

The German military historian Hans Delbrück described this approach as the “strategy of annihilation.” It assumed and accepted high casualties on both sides. Historian Russell F. Weigley says, “The strategy of annihilation became characteristically the American way in war.”

That was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy in the final phase of the Civil War. Departing from the more cautious approaches of his predecessors, Grant threw the mass of his Army of the Potomac, again and again, against Robert E. Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant’s campaign was marked by the large numbers of killed and wounded. To get the job done, he was willing to accept higher casualties than he inflicted.

In the first month, according to Weigley, the Army of the Potomac “suffered 55,000 casualties, not far from the total strength with which the rival Army of Northern Virginia began the month.” Lee’s army took 32,000 casualties that month, but Lee had more difficulty than Grant did in replenishing his ranks.

Grant eventually won but afterward was unable to shed his reputation as a butcher.

The World Wars and Vietnam

The strategy of annihilation prevailed through the World Wars. All of the nations engaged in those wars accepted casualties as a grim necessity, but Hitler was one of the few who expended the lives of his troops recklessly.

Hitler ordered the beleaguered German Army not to surrender at Stalingrad in 1943, declaring that “the duty of the men at Stalingrad is to be dead.” Sixty thousand Germans were killed at Stalingrad. Another 110,000 were captured by the Soviets and few of them ever came home.

The military death toll for World War II was a staggering 19.4 million killed in battle. Of those, 292,000 were Americans. The total of US military deaths in World War II, counting nonbattle deaths, was 405,000. Total US dead in the Korean War were 37,000 and in the Vietnam War, 58,000.

In Vietnam, the number of battle deaths was reduced by effective search and rescue operations which quickly pulled the seriously wounded out of firefights in the jungle and flew them to medical treatment by helicopter. American losses in Vietnam were a fraction of those the Viet Minh and the North Vietnamese were willing to accept in order to defeat first the French and then the United States.

From 1959 to 1975, “more than four million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians on both sides—roughly 10 percent of the entire population—were to be killed and wounded,” said Stanley Karnow in his comprehensive history of the war.

“ Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this Earth,” said Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s military leader. “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”
The US was far less tolerant of casualties, more so as the war bogged down and the prospect of victory diminished. Unflinching television coverage had a strong influence on public opinion.

But rising and visible casualties were only part of what soured the nation on Vietnam. The war was tightly controlled by politicians in Washington. The US commitment was halfhearted and vacillating. Military force was dribbled out in limited actions and gradual escalation.

Field forces were required to report “body counts” of the enemy dead. These were notoriously inaccurate and fooled nobody. Body counts gained such notoriety that to this day, US forces do not attempt to count or estimate enemy casualties.
Two products of the Vietnam experience—the “Vietnam syndrome,” which described the supposed avoidance of US military action abroad, and the “Weinberger Doctrine”—would figure in the casualty debates 30 years later.

In 1984, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger announced a series of tests that should be met before US forces were committed to combat. Was a vital national interest at stake? Had other options been exhausted? Would we commit sufficient force to win, and did we have the determination to stay the course?

These guidelines—sometimes called the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine because Gen. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, strongly agreed—were a reminder to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam.

The Weinberger Doctrine did not suggest avoiding combat to prevent casualties, although that accusation would be made years later.

Effects-Based Operations

US capabilities demonstrated in Gulf War I—mainly information superiority, stealth, and precision strike—were the leading indicators of what was called the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”

The capabilities got better as the decade went along.

American forces could see into enemy territory and track targets moving on the ground and in the air with deep-looking radar on E-3 AWACS and E-8 Joint STARS aircraft. Electronic emissions were monitored. Circling drones fed live video transmissions to gunships.

Over Kosovo, B-2 bombers struck nightly from their home bases in the United States. Each aircraft attacked 16 different targets on a single sortie.

Under Napoleonic strategy, the objective had been destruction of the enemy’s army. Now a new approach was possible. It was called Effects-Based Operations.
The objective was not to destroy the enemy but to gain a strategic result. Destruction of the enemy was never more than a means to a strategic end, not an end in itself.

In some cases, the strategic objective might still be to destroy the enemy’s army and occupy his capital, but more often, the desired result is something else. Keep enemy armor from massing. Halt an invasion. Take away the enemy’s ability to command and control his forces. Inhibit his aggression.

“ With precision targeting and longer-range systems, commanders can achieve the necessary destruction or suppression of enemy forces with fewer systems, thereby reducing the need for time-consuming and risky massing of people and equipment,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in “Joint Vision 2010” in 1996.
More effectiveness. More flexibility. Fewer casualties.

However, it was controversial for a number of reasons, one of them being that it put more emphasis on airpower and moved away from the clash of forces on the ground.

Friendly Fire

“ Friendly fire” casualties are those inflicted by forces on one’s own side. In Desert Storm, 35 Americans were killed and 72 were wounded by friendly fire.

The 35 dead accounted for about a fourth of the US military members who died in action in that conflict. That was a higher percentage than the historical norm, around two percent, but that is partly because losses to enemy fire were historically low.
Friendly fire is often thought of as something that aircraft do to ground troops, but many of these casualties are the result of fire from tanks, artillery, and other weapons.

In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, 58 percent of the friendly fire casualties were ground to ground, 37 percent were air to ground, and five percent were ground to air. In Desert Storm, 61 percent were ground to ground, 36 percent were air to ground, and three percent were ground to air.

“ The problem is our weapons can kill at a greater range than we can identify a target as friend or foe,” Army Maj. Bill McKean told American Forces Press Service in 1999. “Yet if you wait until you’re close enough to be sure you are firing at an enemy, you’ve lost your advantage.”

Civilian Casualties

Wars have always caused civilian casualties, both directly and indirectly. In World War I, for example, the 13 million civilian deaths outnumbered the 8.5 million military deaths. Displaced persons were hard hit by an influenza epidemic that swept the world and took millions of lives. Other civilian deaths were caused by starvation, exposure, and disease.

One of the most famous instances of civilian casualties