How are casualties in battles/wars calculated?
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Depending on the era and how chaotic the situation was, you started by asking each team, platoons and companies to do a head count. You will get the immediate known KIA numbers and a lot of MIA. Most platoons and companies can keep track how many are left and how many known deaths.
Early armies would stop at this point and simply hand out the pay up to the reported amount to the paymaster and let him do the counting. If they don’t pay, it goes into rations and food distribution team to calculate how many men are left vs how much food left.
Then you track down the MIA in the hospitals, infirmaries, morgues, dump sites.
That will give you the bulk of your data.
What’s left are the guys going AWOL, mixed in bodies with the civilians, simply don’t have a body, captured by enemy, lost somewhere, or send somewhere else before…etc.
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