Out of all the wars America has been involved in, which war would give me the lowest odds of survival? (In terms of the total number of military personnel who served throughout the war, and the percentage of those who were killed in action)

by CharlieBravo92

Sorry if this is worded poorly, but I believe the question makes sense. In my mind, I always imagine Vietnam as being the most brutal, but I don't know any numbers.

Also, if it's not too much trouble I'm also curious which war would have been most likely to kill me as a civilian. I understand most of America's wars have been fought overseas, but the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War obviously caused casualties on our own soil, and my odds of survival could be calculated by taking the total civilian population at the time and finding the fraction of those who were killed as a direct consequence of military action.

For any answers regarding the Civil War, let's assume I'm serving on the Union side.

Capt_Blackadder

You are thinking of it in the wrong way. The worst in terms of statistics would be the Mexican Wars due to the low numbers of soldiers with a relatively large number of casualties. Here are the numbers that explain this situation.

There were around 80,000 american soldiers in that war of which 1,733 died in battle and another 11,550 died during the war from other causes. Adding those numbers up lead to a result saying as a soldier in the Mexican War you had a 17% chance of dying which just beats out the American Civil War in terms of number of soldiers killed in a war as a percentage of serving soldiers.