Battle casualty
A combat casualty is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action. At the same time, it’s a loss of military equipment in battle [Merriam-Webster Dictionary].
In military usage, a casualty is a person in service killed in action, killed by disease, diseased, disabled by injuries, disabled by psychological trauma, captured, deserted, or missing, but not someone who sustains injuries that do not prevent them from fighting. Any casualty is no longer available for the immediate battle or campaign, the paramount consideration in combat, the number of casualties, is simply the number of members of a unit who are not available for duty. The word has been used in a military context since at least 1513.
When reviewing military medical data, the term “casualty” must be approached with caution. “Casualty” in typical military usage means active duty personnel lost to the theater of operations for medical reasons. The term includes illness and noncombat injuries and combat injuries.
Even using this definition, sub-groups of casualties may be included or excluded from a given set of summary statistics, depending on the definitions in use at the time, with significant effects both on the results and the inferences that are made from these results when compared with other data sets [Holcomb, Lynn, Stansbury, Howard, p.397].
Casualty. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/casualty
Holcomb, M., Lynn, G., Stansbury, M., Howard, R. (2006). Understanding Combat Casualty Care Statistics. The Journal of Trauma. 16,397-401. Washington: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.