We know that At least 4,029 American soldiers have died during the war in Iraq, and another 29,600 have been wounded in action.
According to recent estimations, at least 16,500 insurgents, militia, suicide bombers, and other fighters have been killed during the war.
Usually, the ratio between KIA and WIA is 1:2. That would give us an estimated 50,000 Iraq insurgency casualties.
If we compare that with the 35,000 US casualties, the relations are surprisingly even.
To the US casualties should be added more than 10,000 KIA among the Iraq Security Forces, with probably another 20,000 WIA, for a total of 30,000 casualties.
So the insurgency appears to have inflicted 60,000 casualties on the US and Iraq Security Forces, against maybe 50,000 own casualties.
My question is how come the US forces apparently have failed to deal an enemy which is much lighter armed, probably far less well trained, and without any air support, the usual kill ratio of 5 to 10 insurgency casualties for each casualty sustained by a regular and modern army.
In the Vietnam war, there were 58,000 US troops KIA and 184,000 South Vietnamese troops KIA, against 1.1 million North Vietnamese or FNL soldiers or guerillas KIA. The ratio was nearly 1:5.
But in Iraq, the casualty ratio appears to be only 1:1 or even worse.
Whatever you may think of the war in Iraq, this represents a quite dramatic new trend, and the reasons to this deserve to be examined.
This is the source which I used:
Casualties of the Iraq War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's the best source I could find. If someone else could find a better sorce, it would be welcome.