Near the end of "The Great Escape", an American officer asked his German captors, "How many were wounded?" That's a valid question here. One that goes unanswered.
But let's examine the underlying data, the actual
statistics compiled by the Department of Defense, and see if there's a trend.
Looking in the column "Total Deaths" we see a steady decline from 2,392 in 1980 to a low of 758 in 2000, and a steady increase every year after (2006 being incomplete, as noted on the table).
Plugging the fatality numbers into Excel shows an average drop of 82 fatalities a year from 1981 through 2000, and an average increase of 237 per year from 2001 through 2005. Comparing the 758 deaths in 2000 to the 1,941 deaths in 2005 shows an increase of 256%.
The trend establishes a steady improvement that Bush erased, and then reversed. The original post faults Carter for lacking the professional military and the improved equipment that saved so many lives, while ignoring Bush's decision to launch an avoidable war that cost 4,000 lives without making us any safer.
It's easy to minimize the sacrifices of our soldiers by counting only fatalities, and averaging the data out over a period long enough to smooth out a discrepancy. I'm not sure why the right-wing thinks it good politics to pretend the costs of this war are of little consequence.