War

What is War?

Most of us are aware that “war” is not an exact term. In the USA we have “declarations of war”, “military operations” and a million other terms to describe our conflicts. For our purposes here, we listed every major military engagement whether it was officially a “war” or not.

What we think people will find interesting:

Honestly? We feel this is the area most people will find least interesting. Do people associate wars with a particular party?

We think people may find it interesting that both parties have an almost identical number of wars.
While a single death attributed to war is too many, we do think some may find it interesting to note how low those numbers are considering how active the USA seems to be in so many conflicts around the world.

Sidenote:

The War in Libya started in 2011 and was a NATO-led intervention in the Libyan Civil War. We can not attribute NATO operations to any president. Please also note that American fatalities in Libya were 1.
For total American soldier losses, we removed WWII as again we feel this was an abnormal situation and the purpose of tracking this data is to ascertain some type of “expectation”. When you remove an outlier from a dataset it can give you a more reasonable “average” and expectation.

The Data:

This was arguably a difficult category to quantify. Some wars people may feel were “just” and other wars some people may feel were “unjust”. Is one party more likely to bring their nation to war? As “Commander-in-chief” are the losses of lives relevant to that leadership? These are not easy questions to answer. We do attribute each war to the person who was president at the start of that war, and do not count an inherited war toward the next president.