Military and Terrorism Deaths Under Republican and Democratic Presidents

5 February 2012

In 2006, I calculated that you are 19.7 times as likely to die in combat if you serve a Republican Commander-in-Chief versus and Democratic one, using data from 1980 to the present and adjusting military death rates (including terrorism and combat) for the fluctuating size of the military (which actually diluted the deaths under Reagan but increased them marginally under Bush).   Comparing this violent death rate per 100,000 military per year by presidential party of President made it clear that Republican presidents, despite all their cowboy bluster (or perhaps because of it) are far more likely to get you killed.  Some of my friends in uniform argued that that in itself is not sign of a failure, that the objective is to win wars, not only preserve lives, and there is a necessary utilitarian trade-off, but this puts Republicans on even weaker ground since it is hard to call the catastrophe that unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq as victories for anyone, certainly not us since no critical national security issues required that level of carnage, and the Iraq war in particular was an elective, aggressive war started on false pretenses that failed to accomplish its stated objective (you cannot disarm someone of WMD he does not have). 
Tonight I decided to update those numbers, but to use a simpler methodology.   Using publicly available data reported by the Pentagon and compiled by the Congressional Research Office and icasualties.org I did a year-by-year tally of all military and terrorism deaths and created running totals and averages for the party of the president that year. 
Since 1980, 8,353 Americans have died in combat or from international terrorism under Republicans.
1,601 Americans died under Democratic presidents, most in the past few years in the two wars started by a Republican, but in fairness I tallied these deaths in the Democratic column, since arguably President Obama could have more aggressively ended the disaster in Iraq and not escalated Afghanistan.

Since there have been more years of Republican administrations during this time period, I divided the total deaths by party by the number of years in office and a remarkable difference remained:

This final chart is a bit difficult to follow, but simply takes all of the Republican years, in order, then creates a cumulative total by year, then does the same for Democrats.  This allows you to see that after 10 years of Democratic presidents, the total number of deaths was almost undetectable, but after 10 years of Republican presidents, the the better part of 1,000 Americans had died in war or terrorism (illustrating that this difference preceded 9-11 and is not simply a function of Republicans being in office longer (so having more time to have Americans die violently on their watch).  You can also use this graph to imagine - were these trends of the last 30+ years to continue, how many more Americans might be alive today if we had only Democratic administrations or if presidents of either party would read their Presidential Daily Briefs, never put troops in harm's way to look tough or win an election (Reagan sending Marines into Beirut in 1983 or Bush invading Iraq in 2003 come to mind), and have a rational foreign policy that is not so dependent on violence and the projection of violence.