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Method

How the defense casualty figures are made

How the pages of the Defense hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

What the publisher counts

The Defense Casualty Analysis System is the Department of Defense’s record of U.S. military deaths and wounded, kept by the Defense Manpower Data Center. It reports them by named operation: a campaign the Department names, not a declaration of war. A death outside a named operation is not in these figures, and the two aggregates the publisher also lists are left out, because each is a sum of operations already here and would count a death twice.

Hostile, and non-hostile or pending

Every death is classed by the Department. Hostile deaths include killed in action, died of wounds, and died while missing, captured or detained. The Department heads the other column “Non-Hostile/Pending Deaths”, so it holds deaths not yet determined as well as non-hostile ones, which include accidents, illness, homicide and self-inflicted deaths. The categories say how the Department classified a death, not why it happened, and nothing on this site says why.

The same deaths, counted two ways

The publisher counts each operation’s deaths by month and service, and again by casualty category. The two tables describe the same deaths, so a figure on this site comes from one of them and is never added to the other. Every total the publisher prints — each row’s total column, each year’s subtotal, each table’s grand total, and the category totals against the monthly ones — is checked against the sum of its parts before anything is loaded, and a table that does not add up is not loaded at all.

The publisher holds a death in Operation Iraqi Freedom that it does not assign to a month. It is in the operation’s total and not in any year, and the operation’s page says so where the years are shown.

The names of the fallen

The publisher also lists, for each operation, every service member who died in it. Those are person-level official records, and a page for one is the record and nothing else: the name, rank, service, date and place, and the incident as the Department states it, attributed to the Defense Manpower Data Center and linked to its list. No page compares one person with another, and nothing singles one out.

What this data cannot show

  • An operation is the Department of Defense’s named campaign, not a declaration of war. A death outside a named operation is not in these figures.
  • Hostile and non-hostile or pending are the Department’s categories: its tables head the second “Non-Hostile/Pending Deaths”, so a death not yet determined is counted there. The figures say who died and how the Department classified it, not why.
  • Wounded in action are reported by month and service only; the publisher does not break them down by category.
  • The Defense Manpower Data Center revises its tables as records are completed, and each figure carries the publisher’s own extraction date.
  • The spending figures linked from this hub are the spending hub’s: obligations and outlays as USAspending reports them, which are not the same measure and are never added together.

Sources

Data retrieved