BODY COUNTS

The notion that war is in terminal decline is based, at its core, on two insights. First, far fewer people die in battle nowadays than in the past, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the world population. Experts at the Peace Research Institute Oslo pointed this out in 2005, but it was Pinker who introduced the point to a wider audience in his 2011 book. Reviewing centuries of statistics on war fatalities, he argued that not only is war between states on the decline; so are civil wars, genocides, and terrorism. He attributes this fall to the rise of democracy, trade, and a general belief that war has become illegitimate.

Then there is the fact that there has not been a world war since 1945. “The world is now in the endgame of a five-century-long trajectory toward permanent peace and prosperity,” the political scientist Michael Mousseau wrote in an article in International Security earlier this year. The political scientist Joshua Goldstein and the legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro have also argued as much, tying the decline of interstate war and conquest to the expansion of market economies, the advent of peacekeeping, and international agreements outlawing wars of aggression.

Taken together, these two points—fewer and fewer battle deaths and no more continent-spanning wars—form a picture of a world increasingly at peace. Unfortunately, both rest on faulty statistics and distort our understanding of what counts as war.

To begin with, relying on body counts to determine if armed conflict is decreasing is highly problematic. Dramatic improvements in military medicine have lowered the risk of dying in battle by leaps and bounds, even in high-intensity fighting. For centuries, the ratio of those wounded to those killed in battle held steady at three to one; the wounded-to-killed ratio for the U.S. military today is closer to ten to one. Many other militaries have seen similar increases, meaning that today’s soldiers are far more likely to wind up injured than dead. That historical trend undermines the validity of most existing counts of war and, by extension, belies the argument that war has become a rare occurrence. Although reliable statistics on the war wounded for all countries at war are hard to come by, our best projections cut by half the decline in war casualties that Pinker has posited. What’s more, to focus only on the dead means ignoring war’s massive costs both for the wounded themselves and for the societies that have to care for them.

Consider one of the most widely used databases of armed conflict: that of the Correlates of War project. Since its founding in the 1960s, COW has required that to be considered a war, a conflict must generate a minimum of 1,000 battle-related fatalities among all the organized armed actors involved. Over the two centuries of war that COW covers, however, medical advances have drastically changed who lives and who dies in battle. Paintings of wounded military personnel being carried away on stretchers have given way to photographs of medevac helicopters that can transfer the wounded to a medical facility in under one hour—the “golden hour,” when the chances of survival are the highest. Once the wounded are on the operating table, antibiotics, antiseptics, blood typing, and the ability to transfuse patients all make surgeries far more likely to be successful today. Personal protective equipment has evolved, too. In the early nineteenth century, soldiers wore dress uniforms that were often cumbersome without affording any protection against gunshots or artillery. World War I saw the first proper helmets; flak jackets became common in the Vietnam War. Today, soldiers wear helmets that act as shields and radio sets in one. Over the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone, medical improvements have decreased the number of deaths from improvised explosive devices and small-arms fire. As a result of these changes, many contemporary wars listed in COW’s database appear less intense. Some might not make it past COW’s fatality threshold and would therefore be excluded.

Better sanitation has left its mark, too, especially improvements in cleanliness, food distribution, and water purification. During the American Civil War, physicians often failed to wash their hands and instruments between patients. Today’s doctors know about germs and proper hygiene. A six-week campaign during the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to just 293 casualties, fatal and nonfatal, from fighting but a staggering 3,681 from various illnesses. This was no outlier. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, nearly 80 percent of the deaths were caused by disease. Because counting and categorizing casualties in a war is notoriously difficult, these statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, but they illustrate a broader point: as sanitation has improved, so has the survivability of war. The health of soldiers also skews battle deaths, since ill soldiers are more likely to die in battle than healthier soldiers. And military units fighting at their full complement will have higher survival rates than those decimated by disease.