Current cost of war, in dollars and blood

3282 American soldiers, 140 Brits, 124 other, 3546 total. The Lancet believes up to 655,000 Iraqis have been killed (as of July 2006.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_conflict_in_Iraq_since_2003

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Current cost: $378 billion and counting. (link shows realtime clock)
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html

Total projected cost: over $1 trillion.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954/

And this is paydirt right here, statistical cost of America's major wars.

http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/other/stats/warcost.htm

In 1990's dollars, WWI cost $196 billion, WWII cost $2 trillion, Vietnam was $346 billion and Gulf War 1 was $61 billion.

So, it's already Vietnam in terms of cost. Casualties are trickier to measure since we've got a lot more living dead in this war. Vietnam saw 47k combat deaths, 10k "other" deaths (accident/misadventure) and 153k wounded.

If you take a look at the following link, they haven't released wounded figures since October 2005. So we're still at 20k wounded "officially." icasualty has the figure up to 24k, maybe they have more recent info. Also, a higher percentage of those injured have serious injuries, not the old "grandpa, show us your scar and tell us your war story" types that are so much fun at family gatherings. This is brain damage, dismemberment, etc.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm

Good going, Bush.





http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/USfatalities.html

May need another bump for the AM crew. I hadn't seen this info around here for a while, other people were usually giving us the weekly updates.

Anybody know the current ratio of minor to serious wounds for soldiers? The stats are hard to find but it's something ridiculous like half of all casualties are disabled. Our medical advances are saving soldiers now who would have been dead in any previous war.

Man, this thing is sinking like Bush's poll numbers.