WASHINGTON — West Point graduates have accounted for a higher percentage of U.S. military combat deaths in the global war on terror than in all but one major American conflict since the academy’s founding in 1802.
As of Monday, 5,293 American troops have been killed in action in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation New Dawn and Operation Enduring Freedom, according to the Department of Defense. Ninety-four of those casualties, or about 1.8 percent, have been former cadets, said a spokeswoman for the United States Military Academy in a phone interview.
“There is an old saying that one death is a tragedy, but thousands are just a statistic,” said retired Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, chief of historical services and support at the Army Heritage and Educational Center. “In the war on terror and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where casualties are relatively low, each death is a tragedy felt by the whole unit.”
The global war on terror cadet-death proportion is nearly seven times higher than in the War of 1812, in which 0.3 percent of the total combat deaths were West Point grads; 42 times greater than among Union forces during the Civil War; nearly 11 times higher than in World War II; nearly four times greater than during the Korean War; more than three times higher than in the Vietnam War; and nearly three times greater than during the Persian Gulf War, where the proportion was 0.7 percent.
The Mexican War, however, which ended in 1848, claimed former cadets at a proportional rate 56 percent higher than during the war on terror.
Combat-death figures for the above conflicts were taken from Naval History and Heritage Command, the history arm of the U.S. Navy. West Point combat-death figures came from the USMA’s 2000 Register of Graduates and Former Cadets.
“Those other wars were fought by mass armies with many officers who were citizen-soldiers, not military professionals,” said USMA history professor Dr. Clifford Rogers in an email. “So the West Point presence was more ‘diluted.'”
Other historians credit a decreasing ROTC presence within the officer corps for the rising percentage of combat casualties represented by former cadets.
“West Point is just a larger portion of the officer corps than it’s been in the course of the 20th Century,” said West Point history professor Dr. Samuel Watson. “The gap between the growth in Officer Candidate School and decline of ROTC has been felt by West Pointers. Anything else would be coincidental.”
Fully 80 percent of male USMA graduates, who become second lieutenants upon graduation, must go into combat arms, Watson added. Candidate school and ROTC graduates, on the other hand, may choose either infantry or another career path within the Army.
The war on terror has been characterized by counterinsurgency, a warfare tactic that has put more pressure on junior officers in general, Crane said.
“COIN is a small-unit fight — not big units,” said Crane, who graduated from West Point in 1974. “Whether you win or lose depends on how much risk the junior leaders and people at point of spear are willing to take.”
Col. Robert Cassidy, a professor at the Naval War College, has served on several operational deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently he served on a yearlong stint in Afghanistan that ended in June 2011.
To combat the widespread insurgency in Iraq, junior officers were dispersed among the indigenous population and patrolled streets and highways, where insurgents commonly strike, Cassidy said.
“Junior officer and non-commissioned officer leaders at the company level and below operate in dispersed positions and smaller units, so it may be because more of them are subject to IEDs and ambushes,” Cassidy inferred about the rising cadet-death proportion.
Crane, a former history professor at West Point, has lost three former students in the war on terror.
“Every cadet must understand that it’s a possible outcome of that career choice,” Crane said. “It should reinforce the respect people have for people who make that choice.”