Taking a tip from the New York Times, the BBC has released an interactive tool for analyzing statistics of soldier deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can organize the data by date (back to 2001), cause of death, branch of service, rank, gender, and age, allowing an amazing look at the data. They also have special “markers” in the timeline that allow you to correlate certain spikes in the data with national events.
See an example after the break.
If you examine the largest spike, around March 2003, you see this:
You can see that this is the date of a UK Marine Assault on Iraq, which makes sense. However, if you look deeper into the data you see that the majority of the servicemen were Army, not marines, and died from Accidental causes, not Hostilities.
What else can you uncover in the data?
BBC NEWS | UK | British military fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq.
