Welcome, Modern War listeners. I'm Captain Jake Moraldi. Today on the podcast we'll be talking to Dr.

Tanisha Fazzal, an associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame,

and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Dr. Fizal's most recent work

discusses the change and kill-to-wounded ratio in war, its effect on soldiers, policymakers, and the public.

As always, the views expressed in this podcast are those of the respective participants

and do not constitute the position of the United States government.

This is the Modern War Institute podcast.

All right, so Dr. Fasal, thank you for joining us today on the podcast.

In much of your writing, you talk about the false modern oppression of the number of casualties and warfare,

primarily about how the changing nature of battlefield mortality skews our understanding of war. As a way to kind of frame our discussion,

I want to start out and ask you how and why battlefield mortality has changed, and then we can get

deeper into the larger effects of that change. So I think that the way to start thinking about

this is to talk in terms of the wounded to killed ratio, which is

exactly what it sounds like. It's the number of wounded divided by the number of killed. And

for centuries, if not millennia, this ratio was very steady at three to one. You could set your

clock by this. And lots of people, in fact, did set their clock by this.

But for advanced industrial democracies, like the United States, that ratio has been increasing over time. And today, depending on who you talk to, for the United States military, it's

somewhere between 10 to 1 and 17 to 1. So the wounded to killed ratio has increased dramatically, and it's somewhere between 10 to 1 and 17 to 1. So the Wounded to Killed ratio has increased dramatically,

and it's increased really in the most recent complex in Iraq and Afghanistan for the United States.

And I would say that there are four factors that are driving this increase

that all have to do with improvements in medicine.

Many of them have to do with improvements in medicine. Many of them have to do with improvements in military medicine specifically. So the first factor, and the military physicians I've talked to about this,

...