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.
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.
Any county who hides a fallen soldier is not worthy to exist, for they have no respect for themselves.
Also… Those who falsify deaths, a lack of humanity, and in the long run the truth comes out.
The other commenters are right that limited information can allow you to scale down the no. of dead as very few people will be able to check every single person. The other thing that countries can do is list their presumed dead under “missing”. In wars where the majority of casualties will come from attacks into enemy lines it is unlikely that bodies will be recovered and when weapons like artillery are used there may not be bodies remaining.
So if you don’t want to admit that you got 1000 men killed you put 400 men in the dead column (Especially any that have bodies to return, and the rest you can put in the missing category and whether truthfully or not claim you don’t know what happened, maybe they were captured by the enemy forces.
In a war both sides will often try to inflate the numbers of enemies killed and downplay their losses, which is why some organisations are currently using things like obituaries and probate cases to try and gain a more reliable data. Though again this has limits on the accuracy.
Going off ww1 and ww2 methods was a simple censorship of news. They didn’t release the actual numbers to the media. H1v1 flu pandemic that hit during ww1 got misnamed the Spanish flu since Spain was the only country to release close to real numbers so looked like they had a lot higher death rate ny a huge factor then the remainder of the world.
But those families won’t know the other 999 soldiers.
How would they know if they were one of 400, or one of 1000.
You mean a government that faces consequences for lying like a liberal democracy, where a journalist will sell their mother to get a Pulitzer roasting a local politician, or a government that doesn’t like Russia, where such journalists are forcefully motivated into alternative career choices?
The russia doesn’t even acknowledge the PoWs we capture unless we literally put them on YouTube.
They simply don’t tell relatives, and despite putin admitting to 700 thousands dead, most relatives simply don’t get notified their guy died.
It’s also hard to count, who knows how many crewmen were in APC or the tank and of shrapnel falling into trench killed or wounded anybody?
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