The Imbalance of Military Deaths

Fred Kaplan of Slate has delved into the comments of General Wesley Clark about the qualifications of John McCain to be president. (Alex discussed the issue here).

Slate’s take has been that the remarks Clark made were not particularly beneficial to Barack Obama and Kaplan opines that we’ve seen the last of Clark as a national security adviser to Obama.

There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark’s politically tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.

First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004 presidential campaign?

Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he couldn’t hold back some raging impulse, he went on:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There’s nothing about flying a plane—or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle—that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen. Barack Obama—who also has never held an executive position and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient patriotism—he should have known that it’s best not to wander this turf.

But Kaplan’s second argument is more interesting. He believes that the remarks were motivated by the fact that Clark was an Army infantryman in Vietnam, while McCain was a Navy airman. Kaplan details the rivalry between the two service branches in ‘Nam (for example, the Navy — and the Air Force — refused to provide air cover to Army soldiers on the ground, instead returning to dine in the officer’s club after their missions while soldiers ate scraps in the jungle) and believes that Clark’s remarks were a manifestation of old rivalries.

The article then describes how the competition between branches has diminished over time, in part due to legislation and in part due to the fact that there is so much money in the military budget now, there is less reason for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to compete — they all already just about get whatever they want.

But the rivalries haven’t altogether disappeared. I found this paragraph and the accompanying chart particularly interesting, prompting the entry you are reading:

Still, tensions persist. Some soldiers and Marines resent the Air Force and Navy for shouldering so light a burden in Iraq, bearing only 4 percent of the fatalities and 2 percent of the injuries in this war. (See chart below.)

That’s a large imbalance. Close to 4,000 of the 4,105 military deaths U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq have been taken by the Army and the Marines. Only about 150 were suffered by the Air Force or the Navy. Only about 1,000 of the 48,000 injured were Air Force or Navy personnel. The resentment by those in the Army and the Marines is understandable.

Kaplan concludes by summing up the Clark-McCain personal rivalry:

And that may explain what was going on in the mind of Clark on Sunday morning. In his case, the institutional resentments may have been stiffened by personal ones. McCain, as he noted, has never held a position of command. Clark, on the other hand, has held many—not just as a company commander in Vietnam and at Ft. Knox but also as the supreme allied commander in Europe and, in that capacity, as the commander of the air war in Kosovo. And yet in his bid for the presidency, Clark barely made it past the New Hampshire primaries, while McCain—this fighter pilot and war prisoner—is one of the two finalists to become the ultimate commander, the commander in chief.

Life, the Army man might have been thinking, just isn’t fair.