USA Today cover story.
When you do the division, you get this for frequencies:
- 13,000 or so deaths a month, or 400 a day for the Civil War (where both sides are counted in the total);
- 9200 deaths a month, or 300 a day for WWII;
- 565 deaths a month, or 19 a day for Vietnam;
- 308 deaths a month, or 10 a day for the Revolutionary War;
- 51 deaths a month, or 1-2 a day for Iraq; and
- 9-10 deaths a month, or one every three days for Afghanistan.
America has only about 31m people during the Civil War, so the percentage of the population is stunning at 1 in every 50 Americans dead.
The same ratio for WWII (132m population) is 1 in every 325 Americans.
For Vietnam (200m), it's 1 in every 3,450 Americans.
For Afghanistan/Iraq combined (300m), it's 1 in every 56,000 Americans.
A sense of the burden relative to the population and over time.
If we count Afghanistan as a war, I believe it's fair to argue that it's still shorter than our counterinsurgency effort in the Philippines from 1899 to 1913, or roughly 175 months. We lost 4,200 troops there (24 a month or almost one a day, on average).