Casualty estimation refers to the process of statistically estimating the number of people killed, injured, or otherwise harmed in an event when complete records are unavailable. The term casualty is used in both military and civilian contexts and may apply to a range of events, including armed conflict, natural disasters, and accidents.
A range of approaches can be employed, including direct documentation, survey-based methods, and statistical modeling, depending on the availability and reliability of data.
Approaches based on the systematic documentation of individual deaths became known as casualty recording in the early twenty-first century. [1] A related concept, casualty prediction, is the process of estimating the number of injuries or deaths that might occur in a planned or potential battle or natural disaster.
Methods of casualty estimation vary depending on the institutional context, the scale of the event, and the availability and reliability of data.
In armed conflicts, when complete reporting is unavailable or unreliable, researchers and analysts often combine multiple partial sources, triangulate reports, and use complementary estimation methods to infer total deaths and injuries. [2]
A variety of approaches have been described, including:
Measurement and signature intelligence alone cannot give a reasonable estimate of casualties. What Spectroscopic MASINT can do is help find mass graves. Geophysical MASINT can help localize metal and possibly bodies at that site. TECHINT is needed if there are weapons or artifacts to analyze. IMINT has a role to play in tracking movements. These all have to combine with all-source analysis. Perhaps the losses of tanks and aircraft, if available, might better predict what actually happened in a battle. MASINT's mass graves capability is a means that has been used for remote sensing of clandestine mass graves.
Author Sam Adams' book, War of Numbers discusses, in great detail, a process of casualty estimation. Adams was a CIA analyst who eventually resigned over what he felt was political manipulation of casualty figures in the Vietnam War. He explains how he came up with casualty figures for the NLF and PAVN. Adams, and other U.S. analysts dealing with a guerilla war in the jungle, found there were better metrics than "body count". David Hackworth, for example, used a number of enemy weapons captured after an engagement, and that turned out to be a good predictor of casualties, with certain limits.
Recent advances are improving the speed and accuracy of loss estimates immediately after earthquakes (within less than an hour) so that injured people may be rescued more efficiently. After major and large earthquakes, rescue agencies and civil defense managers rapidly need quantitative estimates of the extent of the potential disaster, at a time when information from the affected area may not yet have reached the outside world. For the injured below the rubble, every minute counts. To rapidly provide estimates of the extent of an earthquake disaster is much less of a problem in industrialized than in developing countries. This article focuses on how one can estimate earthquake losses in developing countries in real time.