If you want to compare with something, compare the WWI dead with the 375 dead in three times as long a similarly-sized strop in Afghanistan involving around 100 000 Brits? Yup, they were homicidal maniacs, just not on quite the same scale as those Teribus compares with. I'm using the current set of data because we have an accurate and detailed list to work with.

375 dead? Yes, I subtracted the 60 who died from causes other than enemy action from the supposed 435, the suicides, the 10 who died from "friendly" fire, the fraggings, the deaths from poorly-designed kit. The 14 guys who died when a 40 year-old Nimrod blew up after refuelling in midair, because the MOD hadn't bothered to sort the refuelling system still leaking like a bloody sieve four years into the War, ignoring the "lessons" supposedly learned using them in the Falklands War. The Nimrod was a derivative of the de Havilland Comet, the first ever passenger jet whose design dates back as far as 1943 and whose first series was withdrawn from service within a year of entering service in 1954 because the designers had to learn the hard way about metal fatigue. There are those who say they died from enemy inaction from the same school of blithering incompetents we're discussing here. And if you want me to get really agressive on that count, there's another 34 dead in Iraq and Afghanistan from the MOD insisting on their using Snatch Landrovers, despite the resignation of people like the SAS' Major Seb Morley over the issue. Or the 28 who died in Warrior IFVs, also used in a context they were not designed for. My bet for the most ridiculous of the deaths among the 435 attributed to my soul is the poor guy who died in a jet-ski accident in Cyprus on R&R on the way home. Perhaps we should add Kirsty MacColl in too...

To bring this back to the original point, the same can be said of the dead in WWI who did not die of enemy action, but from disease caused by the conditions they were forced to live in, one third of those who are numbered among the Glorious Dead, grosso modo 300 000. And you cannot attribute those deaths to enemy action. These are figures, reasons and blames anyone in a Command situation must carry engraved on their soul, lest they witlessly add to the count.