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May 11, 2003
Understanding
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
It used to be the case that many of the soldiers whose bodies were buried overseas, or returned to the US for burial, were of unknown soldiers. That is, we knew they were American soldiers, but did not know which ones they were. For all but the most advanced nations, this is still the case. The last unknown soldier that the US interred was from Viet Nam, but he was disinterred and identified using DNA analysis. The US will never again recover the body of a soldier and not be able to identify him.
What is amazing about this story (hat tip, Transterrestrial Musings) is not the fight and bravery (I expect that from all American soldiers) but that we are putting so much effort into completely understanding what amounts to a minor incident. Almost no one else will go to these lengths: in war it is inevitable that soldiers will take a wrong turn, and get ambushed and killed. Mistakes, friction, the "fog of war" are everpresent realities.
But not necessarily forever. The US is turning vast amounts of attention to understanding every single aspect of every event in a war zone - no matter how trivial. We are studing who was in what vehicles when, and how they decided to fight, and how they died - and not just on the American side. We also study civilian deaths and enemy deaths.
We are putting such an intense spotlight on the fog of war that we are burning away the confusion, a little at a time. It will never be completely gone, of course; that is an impossibility. But we are reducing it dramatically. Since Viet Nam, we have sought to understand every single aspect of the circumstances of combat, and to correct for those that work to get people killed. We've been willing to pour exceptional resources into understanding events that, in Viet Nam or Korea or WWII or even the Phillipine occupation after the Spanish-American war, would have not even merited footnotes. In the end, I think that it is this focus on the exact circumstances of the death of every American soldier, and the willingness to pay exhorbitant sums to prevent it from happening again, which have led to the exceptionally small number of deaths in wars since Viet Nam.
(By the way, in order to give an idea of how small our number of deaths is, it is useful to look at casualty models. By the models that were in use in 1991, we should have suffered about 8000 to 10000 casualties, about a 3000-4000 of them dead. But we suffered only 146 dead out of less than 650 total casualties. By those same models, we should have lost about 25000 to 35000 troops in the latest war (about 9000 to 12000 dead), rather than under 150 dead and less than 500 wounded.)
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