Reply #31: Possible reasons for the discrepancy

[MADem]

1. They are gaming the numbers. Why? Who knows. It just does not make sense.

2. They had an unusual number of deaths all at once from wounds in hospitals at Landschtul, Walter Reed, and elsewhere. Unlikely, but as the total of dead and wounded comes up, what seems like a big number becomes a much smaller "percentage of the total" over time.

3. They've been busy on the Syrian border of late, lost a large number, and held the numbers because families were hither and yon for Thanksgiving, making notification problematic. Not much reporting coming out of "Operation Let's Fuck With Syria" so that would be hard to pin down.

4. A troop transport aircraft has recently crashed, and they haven't released the info pending notification, to avoid a swamp of phone calls to Casualty Assistance over the shorthanded Thanksgiving Day holidays.

5. Some idiot "forgot" to make a large number of entries (either a list of dead, or lists of wounded who died in hospitals) to the central database, or was transferring, and failed to turn over the lists for inclusion to his or her relief. Or they fell behind the filing cabinet. That idiot has since been fired or reassigned and the mistake corrected, quietly, over the holiday weekend (if you think that is an unlikely scenario, it isn't--I've seen screwups like that happen, though not with this grave an import).

Hopefully some intrepid member of the 4th Estate will get going and find an answer.