Casualty Estimates for Conflict with Iran – Summation

Well, things in the Gulf have been quieter this last week. We ended up doing three posts related to the casualty estimates for a conflict in Iran. This was because part of President Trump’s decision making was based on an estimate of 150 killed if they struck Iran. This got my attention, because actually, hearing about casualty estimates before a conflict is kind of rare. We end up with three posts on the subject. The first post on subject speculated that President Trump was given a range of estimates, and that was probably the upper boundary of that range. The second post asked is that estimate was for killed or casualties? If is was killed, then were we looking at over 1,000 casualties from three air strikes?  The third post noted that casualty estimates for “evaluating wars” is not that common. This lead me to guess that no such estimate has been made for an extended conflict with Iran. An extended conflict with Iran could move beyond the Gulf to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Casualty Estimates for Conflict with Iran

Casualty Estimates for Conflict with Iran – Killed and Wounded

How Common are Casualty Estimates?

Anyhow, for the moment things are quiet and nothing has been resolved. We shall see what happens next.

Some other relevant post posts on casualty estimates:

Forecasting the Iraqi Insurgency

Forecasting U.S. Casualties in Bosnia

Assessing the TNDA 1990-91 Gulf War Forecast

Assessing the 1990-1991 Gulf War Forecasts

President Obama’s Casualty Estimates

Casualty Estimates for a War with North Korea

The CRS Casualty Estimates

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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