The third presentation of the second day was by Dr. Michael Spagat, an American scholar that teaches at the Royal Holloway University of London. It is called “Estimating War Deaths (in Iraq):” Iraq Deaths
Dr. Spagat has been focused on examining all casualties in war, and sometimes this has led him to publicly question some of the estimates that other people have provided. It is not unusual to see estimates of combat casualties inflated by an order of magnitude, and by the same token, sometimes civilian casualties get estimated at an order of magnitude higher than what they probably are. Getting a better estimate does not diminish the tragedy nor change the story. I do feel that inflated estimates actually undermine the authenticity of the story; but more to the point, facts-are-facts and data-is-data and this stuff is actually important. Anyhow, I am a big fan of Dr. Spagat’s work as demonstrated by this series of threads I posted in 2017 that I think all readers of this blog should take a look at: TDI Friday Read: Mike Spagat’s Economics of Warfare Lectures & Commentaries | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
The first presentation of the day was my monstrosity, Iraq, Data, Hypotheses and Afghanistan (which I later turned into the book America’s Modern Wars): NIC Compilation 3.1
The second presentation of the day was Lessons Learned from Haiti 1915-1934 by Dr. Christopher Davis of UNCG: History as an Enemy and Instructor
————–
We had a total of 30 presentations given at the first Historical Analysis Annual Conference (HAAC). We have the briefing slides from most of these presentations. Over the next few weeks, we are going to present the briefing slides on this blog, maybe twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursday). In all cases, this is done with the permission of the briefer. We may later also post the videos of the presentations, but these are clearly going to have to go to another medium (Youtube.com). We will announce when and if these are posted.
The briefings will be posted in the order given at the conference. The conference schedule is here: Schedule for the Historical Analysis Annual Conference (HAAC), 27-29 September 2022 – update 16 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
The nine presentations given on the first day are all here: Presentations from HAAC – Air Combat Analysis on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)