"Even if 90% of all casualties are civilians you still can be safer being a civilian than a soldier. It depends on the proportion of soldiers to civilians." Of course Wolfgang is right, and it was oversimplifying on my part to write something that suggested anything else.

You can have a situation where there are very few soldiers involved, and a lot of civilians; even if all the soldiers were killed along with a much smaller percentage of the civilian population, the proportion of the dead who were civilians would be far higher.

What is beyond doubt is that the numbers of civilians killed in modern wars has increased enormously, and the number of soldiers (etc) killed has been very much reduced, especially in high-tech armies.