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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It’s hard to obfuscate the total number of people who died, but it isn’t hard to obfuscate the *cause* of those deaths. Only a relatively small percentage of the people who die in war are actually killed directly by an enemy on the battlefield; it is far more common to die of accidents, malnutrition, disease, or lingering wounds. In some modern wars deaths from suicide alone can exceed the number of people actually killed by enemy forces.
So there’s a lot of room for fiddling when it comes to reporting deaths due to warfare. If you only report those actually killed by an enemy on a battlefield, the numbers will be much smaller than if you report the increase in total mortality over the course of the war.
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