..the 200th British military death in Afghanistan...
A much more telling statistic than the number of dead is the number of wounded. Even more important than this is the number of severely wounded men and women and the startling ratio of wounded to dead. In the second world war the ratio of dead to wounded was 1:4. During the Vietnam war there were 15 wounded men for every American fatality in theatre. In Afghanistan and Iraq the ratio for British and American troops is between 1:30 and 1:40.
Today, in Afghanistan, a significant proportion of our wounded soldiers are so-called ‘tier-four’ casualties. That essentially means they have suffered such a combination of catastrophic wounds, say loss of limbs and brain damage, that they would not have survived in any previous war.
For every 30 wounded casualties there is an average of seven men with tier-four injuries. There may already be between 2,000 and 3,000 soldiers grievously wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan who are in this tier-four category.
Bookmarks