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.
In: Other
It really isn’t hard. The public doesn’t really know what is going on. Even if there is a draft they only generally know ‘a lot’ of young men got sent to war. Unless you personally know ‘soldier 132’ you aren’t going to know if he came home or not because quite frankly it doesn’t affect you in anyway.
Even if months/years later you meet the widow of 132 …so what? 133 is just the same to you.
In a fully transparent government there would be a detailed list of injured/dead but that will NEVER happen because it is a matter of national security to not allow the other side to know how many combat capable soldiers you have. The enemy doesn’t care about 132, 133 or any other person BUT they do care about how many troops you can field. It really isn’t hard go estimate how many potential troops there are based on how long it takes to train someone, population number, and effectively how much you’ve ‘escalated’ turning your civilian infrastructure into aiding the war machine (you can tell via satellite/ flybys if the ford factory is still producing cars or if it has been retrofitted to produce tanks instead with extreme ease). So the only way to hide the number of combat ready troops is to pretend less have been injured/killed. Battlefield intelligence is dodgy and there are countless times where it isn’t possible to really determine if someone was knocked out or killed. One can (in many instances) be rehabilitated in days/weeks and is back to the battle the other is…well dead.
Latest Answers