Saturday, March 10, 2012

One aspect of the human cost of the Afghanistan 'surge'

I just stumbled across this WaPo article from a year ago. It's about (among other things) the increase from 2009 to 2010 in wounds to U.S. soldiers that required amputation of one or more limbs. Drawing on data from "a team of surgeons at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where virtually every evacuated soldier stops en route to the United States," the article notes:

In 2009, 75 soldiers underwent amputation and 21 lost more than one limb. In 2010, 171 soldiers had amputations and 65 lost more than one limb. GU [genito-urinary] injuries increased from 52 to 142 over the same period.

I stumbled across the article because this article linked it.

3 comments:

hank_F_M said...

A littile more recent

I have read in several places that the Taliban is avoiding fire fights with US troops, in preferce to IUD's and land mines. They are not winning fire fights.

LFC said...

Thanks for the link.
---

"They are not winning fire fights."
Given the likely balance of firepower, etc, this isn't surprising, is it? But it also is not necessarily that significant, if in fact the Taliban manage to avoid fire fights most of the time.
(I'm not a particular fan of the Afghanistan-Vietnam analogy, but how many firefights vs US soldiers did the Vietcong win?)

And that should be IEDs, yes? (We probably don't want to start fighting the contraception issue here. You can guess my views anyway, and we've got enough on the plate.)

hank_F_M said...

OPPS!