Officers praise (blocked) casualty site

Hopefully this will be among my last posts on this, but I've spoken with the owner of icasualties.org, who points out that his site provides far more detail than the military's tally. For instance, you can sort the casualty figures by name, age, rank, branch of service, unit, or even reported cause of death. (The top-ranked cause is "hostile fire," the second is IED attack, and the third, at nine percent, is actually "Non-hostile - vehicle accident.")

While the military seems to have decided that the site doesn't qualify as a "legitimate news source," some sys-admins don't seem to have gotten the message: Some active duty officers have written to icasualties.org singing the site's praises. Presumably they were surfing serving and surfing on military computers. In any case, judging by the two letters (with the names of the officers redacted), somebody is finding the site useful:

Your site is simply outstanding! I am an Army officer preparing a briefing on the current situation in Iraq, and your database is an invaluable tool. By including the location of each death, you have enabled me to identify where in the country soldiers have been at greatest risk. In addition, your data supports the conclusion that our soldiers are remarkably safe when they enter their base camps (only 20 deaths on almost 200 camps - mostly non-hostile).

The site is professionally done and your explanation of methodology gives me confidence that you are the best source of info. I do not know what got you started, but I hope you continue. Researchers should be able to explain a lot with your data.

If you want to stretch farther: Include basic military occupational specialty (MOS) for each soldier. This would allow us to draw conclusions about what kinds of soldiers are at greatest risk. In WW II, the infantry foot soldier accounted for over 80% of total losses. For this reason, infantry soldiers earn the combat infantryman's badge to recognize the increased risk they assume. It would be interesting to see if the preponderance of losses continues to be with infantryman. Or - do our truck-drivers or military police now face the same risks?

In sum - your database represents a great service to the nation! Keep up the great work.

And another:

Excellent work! I heard about this site earlier this week from a MAJ who had recently returned from Iraq, and it does seem to be the most comprehensive site of its type on the Internet.

I had a question about deaths from RPGs and IEDs, based in part on the somewhat surprisingly (to me, anyway) high number of casualties from IEDs compared to RPGs, especially in recent months. Some of this is obviously a change in tactics by the insurgents. However, it occurred to me that since IEDs were likely to be exploded by themselves, any resulting deaths would be unlikely to be classified as coming from another source. On the other hand, RPGs are typically employed in firefights and ambushes, and so it seems more likely that deaths in these cases could be reported as being from "hostile fire", "ambush", "rocket attack", "grenade", "explosion", "vehicle accident", "helicopter crash", etc. 2LT Jonathan Rozier (19 Jul 03) is possibly a specific example of this.