May 9,2008: One way to determine which nations have more effective armed forces is to look at civilian activities that are commonplace, and involve the same mix of technology, leadership and skill that make for battlefield success. How about commercial aviation accident rates? Last year, worldwide, .75 airliners were lost per million flights. In other words, there was a crash every 1.33 million flights. But that varied greatly around the world. In North America, the rate was .09 (one crash per 11.1 million flights). The worst area was Africa, where there were 4.09 crashes per million flights. In South America, it was 1.61 per million. In Europe, it was .29 per million. Russia, and the former states of the Soviet Union, had a very good year, with no crashes. Normally, though Russia falls somewhere between Latin America and Europe. Asia has a loss rate of 2.76, which was a bit worse than usual because of a number of crashes in Indonesia.