US military casualties dropped in October to one of its lowest rates since the war in Iraq began:

The monthly toll of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq is on track to being the lowest in nearly two years, with at least 37 troop deaths recorded as of Tuesday, but the military cautioned it’s too early to declare a long-term trend.  [Kim Gamel, AP]

I have expressed my views about military casualties as metric of success before here, but what I found interesting in this article is that the reporter tries to tie in the military suicide rate with the drop in casualties in Iraq:

There were 99 Army suicides last year — nearly half of them soldiers who hadn’t reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The 2006 total — the highest rate in 26 years of record-keeping and the largest raw figure in 15 years — came despite Army efforts to set up new programs and strengthen old ones for providing mental health care to a force stretched by the longer-than-expected conflict in Iraq and the global counterterrorism war entering its sixth year.

Basically what the reporter is implying is that casualties may be dropping, but soldiers are killing themselves so it doesn’t matter.  I have posted about this last year about how the military suicide rate was being politicized and the same thing is happening this year.  The usual mouth pieces for the left have sensationalized this statistic such as the Washington Post and left wing blogs.  They are claiming soldiers are killing themselves because of the sustained combat and long tours.  If that is so then how do they explain why the suicide rate dropped from 18.8 in 2003 to 10.5 in 2004 when sustained combat with two battles of Fallujah and the multiple battles with the Mahdi Army were raging with deployments being extended then as well?  

More than likely the drop had little to do with conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan just like the increase now has little to do with it as well.  Though every suicide is a tragedy and I wish there was a way to stop them all, but the US Army has an end strength as 1,039,053 soldiers and it is statistically impossible to stop every suicide.  What can be done is to take measures to keep it at a low rate and 99 soldiers committing suicide in one year in such a large sample number is statistically extremely small.  Additionally when you compare it to civilian rates the military’s rate of 17.3 suicides per every 100,000 soldiers is lower than the civilian number when compared by age and gender which comes out to 19.06 per 100,000. 

Statistically speaking someone who joins the military has a lesser chance of committing suicide than someone who doesn’t.   The most likely reason for the increase probably has more to do with random variation in a very small statistical number which is evident by the large unexplainable difference between the 2003 and 2004 number.  So why wasn’t this fact leading media and leftist blog headlines?  You can draw your own conclusions but I think it pretty obvious why they are doing this and it has little to do with supporting the troops as they claim.