US soldiers safer than the rest of us?
Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 1:04 am
As part of my job I'm starting to get into determining acceptable levels of risk for different industrial things.
Anyway the basic premise is that we are not Q who are immortal unless killed by some bizarre Q weaponry. We are, sadly, fairly fragile bags of red goo.
The basis for assessing what risk is considered acceptable is based off of the average chance of a 35 year old man to die that year, which for the US/UK is about 2 in a 1000. That drops to 1 in a 1000 if they started the year without any existing medical conditions.
The "tolerance" for risk in the populace seems to be about at that level. I.e. the riskier jobs like being a logger or deep sea fisherman run at about 1 death on the job per 1000 workers per year. When risk gets much higher than that, people seem to make different choices in work or hobbies.
So I decided to run the numbers for the US armed forces in Iraq. Taking the troop levels over the different years and total casualties, I get that risk for someone deployed is about 4.4 per 1000. So that's higher risk than people would like.
However except for maybe some elite troops much of the military rotates in and out, or gets lucky and spends the whole time on a destroyer or in Germany. Spreading the numbers for Afghanistan and Iraq over the whole armed forces, plus a little rounding up to account for odd deaths here and there, gives an occupational risk during wartime at or under .33 deaths per 1000 per year, which is less than a number of professions.
The bit where I say they might be "safer" is that those death totals likely include things like helicopter crashes and whatnot, whereas usual occupational safety numbers don't include getting hit by someone talking on their cell phone while driving to work. Additionally most of the extra 1 in 1000 risk of dying from existing medical conditions are due to life choices like living a sedentary lifestyle, substance abuse, poor diet, etc etc etc. So what I'm saying is that having to go on runs and whatnot on a regular basis may outweigh the chance of getting deployed and killed, such that the average US service member is, even now, more likely to make it through the year than someone not in the armed forces.
Anyway the basic premise is that we are not Q who are immortal unless killed by some bizarre Q weaponry. We are, sadly, fairly fragile bags of red goo.
The basis for assessing what risk is considered acceptable is based off of the average chance of a 35 year old man to die that year, which for the US/UK is about 2 in a 1000. That drops to 1 in a 1000 if they started the year without any existing medical conditions.
The "tolerance" for risk in the populace seems to be about at that level. I.e. the riskier jobs like being a logger or deep sea fisherman run at about 1 death on the job per 1000 workers per year. When risk gets much higher than that, people seem to make different choices in work or hobbies.
So I decided to run the numbers for the US armed forces in Iraq. Taking the troop levels over the different years and total casualties, I get that risk for someone deployed is about 4.4 per 1000. So that's higher risk than people would like.
However except for maybe some elite troops much of the military rotates in and out, or gets lucky and spends the whole time on a destroyer or in Germany. Spreading the numbers for Afghanistan and Iraq over the whole armed forces, plus a little rounding up to account for odd deaths here and there, gives an occupational risk during wartime at or under .33 deaths per 1000 per year, which is less than a number of professions.
The bit where I say they might be "safer" is that those death totals likely include things like helicopter crashes and whatnot, whereas usual occupational safety numbers don't include getting hit by someone talking on their cell phone while driving to work. Additionally most of the extra 1 in 1000 risk of dying from existing medical conditions are due to life choices like living a sedentary lifestyle, substance abuse, poor diet, etc etc etc. So what I'm saying is that having to go on runs and whatnot on a regular basis may outweigh the chance of getting deployed and killed, such that the average US service member is, even now, more likely to make it through the year than someone not in the armed forces.
