I know it is normal for countries to deflate their casualty numbers during war, but how do they do it? If for example 1000 soldiers are killed in a month, how could a government claim only 400 were killed without the public discover this to be a lie? Surley the families of the killed soldiers are promptly informed.
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…unless you’ve bolstered your ranks with mercenaries, prisoners, disappeared homeless, and you’re drawing from a dispersed population so you only take a few from each town… and you’ve got a propaganda machine that can disguise how many were sent into battle in the first place and lie on the back end about how many are dead.
How many people have died in car accidents so far this year? Do you really know, or do you trust the reporting? What if the reporting is owned by the car companies?
They don’t for the most part. They just announce the acceptable number. And if third parties want to, they will calculate the expansions of cementries, the amount of obituaries online and other pretty obvious stuff
To a degree, its possible. While the families in question know their child has died, as far as they know, their child was one of that 40 reported dead. Also, theirs tricks that can be done and excuses made to paper over reporting errors, like the soldier was initially heavily injured and died sometime later, their death wasn’t reported to the proper authorities for some time, they had difficulty finding the next of kin due to records error, etc, etc.
it would take a great deal of under-reporting for the deceit to become obvious ie they reported 3 dead, but at least 7 died in your town *alone*.
Outside parties can look, piece together evidence that the official death toll is low, but it’s labour intensive, and easy to dismissif your inclined to disbelieve it.
State control over the media is important during a war.
If 1000 soldiers die in a week their families will be spread across the country and you can’t exactly go door to door to confirm the number of casualties. It’s not like they all come from the same community and actively talk to each other.
The key is to make the lie believable. If you said there was only 3 casualties when there was 1000 that’s harder to make people believe that. But shrinking 1000 to 500? that’s hard to confirm. Particularly when you don’t have access to the primary source of information, and the military in some countries don’t have to release their data.
Every country, even those with freedom of the press like the US, have laws to prevent the press from talking openly about national secrets.
The military carefully controls what information is passed along, and even if they provide accurate numbers of casualties etc that information is usually delayed to protect ongoing operations.
Even the press understands that publicly revealing accurate up-to-date information about an ongoing conflict will cost lives. The US press works closely with press officers in the military to get their information and some information is inevitably suppressed.
In the US it’s give and take. So long as the military provides a steady stream of reasonable information to the press, the press is usually happy. The press meanwhile can and will publish information on scandals when they get it and the military is aware of this. In a democracy this helps keep the military in check.
Countries like Russia on the other hand have deep control and influence of the State media. Every report is pain painstakingly crafted to make the government and military look good. Propaganda is an art, and the Russians are masters of it. People that reveal classified information or make the government look bad are punished and sometimes just disappear.
When the only source of information is the government, a lot of people will take whatever they say at face value.
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Say 1000 die and they actually inform all 1000 families.
And then publicly say it was 400. How would the families know their child was one of a 1000 instead of 1 of 400.
They are not exactly giving you a list of names to check.
You can’t just check with the family of each soldier to know if their kid died and the numbers are solid.
Think of it this way: out of the 1000 soldiers who died, very few of their families will know each other. So when the government says 400 have been killed there’s no way for individual families to know whether it is true or not. They’d assume their son/daughter was counted in the 400. If the government said no one died then people all over the country would make noise.
collection on data is problematic, especially in war. Consider: if you right now were to check how many people live in your town, and how many of them that dies during the next month, without using the government official numbers, how would you do it?
Just look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. What informing the families? They send the cannon fodder in, and nobody has a clue which ditch each of them died in, they lose about thousand every damn day. They are all simply missing, maybe some of them managed to get captured and survived, Russia doesn’t know before Ukraine offers to trade prisoners.
The dead that make it back died somewhere in the rear, they don’t bring corpses back from the very front.
No need to hide. Lack of information and transparency is enough of a barrier for any fake number to stand by itself.
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