Posted on 16. Jul, 2008 by admin in charts and graphs, military

So I was researching the U.S. troops strength in Iraq since there was all this talk of surging and pulling out. Turns out there isn’t really any good visuals of it, and the raw data leaves alot to be desired. So I went about creating my own chart.

I would first like to thank the Statistical Information Analysis Division(SIAD) of the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the raw data. As is often the case when the Pentagon and the Internet mingle, the SIAD website looks like it was done by the lone DOD IT guy in between bites of a chicken sandwich

Regardless, here is the data when its cleaned up a bit. (click it to make it bigger)

I have added in major dates related to the Iraq war. The Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force are depicted and labeled. If you see any trends let me know; I am not analyzing this data, just throwing it out there.

For reasons unknown to me, the SIAD does not list troop levels later than December of 2007. The unofficial end of July projection is 140,000 and the unofficial goal expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates for December is 100,000. I will leave the plausibility of that up to you. Whats also missing in the numbers for Operation Enduring Freedom which is for Afghanistan. The data is available for this but not prior to 2005 for some reason so I didn’t include it. There are 20-25,000 troops in Afghanistan at any given time, about 95% Army.

So now that we have a nice clean chart, its time to complicate it with extraneous data sets. Below is the same chart only I overlaid the Dow Jones Index, Halliburtons stock aswell as the Homeland Security’s terror alert indication. See any correlation?

Of course there is no set vertical scale for the economic data but there doesn’t need to be to spot trends. I experiment with other indicators such as the price of oil but the chart became a little overwhelming. I will try more overlays in the future and you’re more than welcome to use the images to your own devices.

Enjoy.