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This chapter presents data that provide strong evidence that U.S. combat casualties are not distributed uniformly across society. Beginning with the Korean War, some communities, particularly those like Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, have borne a disproportionate share of America's wartime sacrifice. The size of the differences in casualty rates between rich and poor communities may not be as great as some of the rhetoric from the Left suggests. While socioeconomically disadvantaged communities do bear disproportionately large shares of the casualty burden, some wealthy and highly educated communities have also suffered significant numbers of casualties. However, contra the protestations of some on the Right, the casualty gap is real, and, perhaps equally significantly, the data suggest that this gap may have widened over time.

A series of controlled experiments were conducted to determine whether knowledge of a casualty gap affects citizens' support for America's war efforts. This chapter shows that explicit discussion of the casualty gap has the power to change substantially public support for the nation's military campaigns. When Americans know that the men and women who are sacrificing their lives on foreign battlefields are coming disproportionately from poorer areas of the country, citizens are much more cautious in their support for both the Iraq War and for preemptive warfare more generally. Mere awareness of the casualty gap can significantly reduce the number of casualties Americans are willing to accept in future missions. A follow-up experiment conducted in the spring of 2009 suggests that even when replicating the casualty sensitivity experiment under a new president and in a period in which economic concerns, not Iraq, were first and foremost on Americans' minds, the casualty gap continues to influence substantially the public's willingness to tolerate large numbers of casualties in future military endeavors.

This chapter begins by presenting the main arguments of the book, which challenge the conventional view that the human costs of war can be understood as a single, aggregate total. To account fully for the costs of war we must consider not only the overall number of casualties but also how this sacrifice has been shared. It discusses the two pathways through which the casualty gap has important political ramifications, and the dearth of studies on casuality gap. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Combining individual-level survey data with state and county electoral returns, this chapter empirically investigates whether the relationships between local casualties, public opinion, and voting behavior in Iraq parallel those observed during the Vietnam era. The data reveal that some of these relationships in the contemporary conflict are dramatically different from those observed in Vietnam, while others remain eerily similar. Americans' differential exposure to casualties continues to play a significant role in influencing support for the war and for the political leaders charged with directing it. At their core, the results of the analysis of Iraq strongly reaffirm that the casualty gap has critically important political ramifications for American governance. Public opinion turns increasingly against the war when citizens experience the costs of war first-hand through casualties from their local community. Because high casualty-rate communities historically tend to have lower levels of income and education, and their residents are less engaged with politics than their peers from low casualty-rate communities, the dampening effect of casualties on hawkish military policies is weaker in practice than conventional wisdom suggests.

This chapter speculates about the future of the casualty gap. It argues that, due to advances in medical technology and the likely small scale of future conflicts, a “wounded gap” will become an increasingly important dimension of inequality that policymakers must consider. Given existing disparities in health care for veterans, a wounded gap may pose a particularly vexing challenge. Finally, whether it is deaths or wounds, raising awareness of the gap is critically important. Because Americans factor in the inequality consequences of conflicts when they evaluate the costs of war and forge their military policy preferences, fostering public recognition and discussion of the casualty gap should have significant consequences for the formulation of military policy.