The Pentagon revealed Saturday that more than 600 troops have been injured or killed in the conflict with Iran, a casualty total more than 200 higher than previously revealed publicly. The new figures were released as part of an apparent overhaul of the Defense Department’s official casualty reporting system, which now splits the war, for the first time, into two time periods.
The new figures bring the current total of U.S. troops wounded in the war to 624, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS. As of Friday, DCAS listed the number of troops injured in the conflict at 420.
The new system, mirroring labels announced by the Pentagon in recent weeks, removes most casualties in July from the tallies of Operation Epic Fury, and puts them instead in a new category, “Overseas Operations.”
Officials also split how they account for the 18 troops killed in the conflict, moving four from Epic Fury into Overseas Operations, including three soldiers killed July 17 in an Iranian attack in Jordan and another killed during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone in Iraq. Those four had been removed from the Pentagon tally late last week, prompting outrage from families of soldiers killed in July.
The new count begins for casualties on July 7, a date the Pentagon has claimed represented the end of Epic Fury. The Trump administration has argued this month that the operation ended on that date with the announcement of a short-lived ceasefire, reseting a legally-mandated 60-day clock to use military force without Congressional approval.
However, the pre- and post-July 7 fighting has been largely similar, with U.S. bombing missions trading blows with waves of Iranian missiles and drones. Trump himself has posted on social media that the “Iran Military Conflict” has seen 18 American service members killed, which includes the four killed after July 7.
Changing casualty numbers
The new figures represent close to 200 more wounded troops — mostly Army soldiers — than previously disclosed. According to DCAS, 182 of the 207 troops wounded since July 7 are soldiers, while 21 are from the Navy. Four airmen have also been wounded.
The move came following a week of unexplained revisions in the Pentagon data. Thursday, the Pentagon scrubbed the July deaths of four Army soldiers from its official count of U.S. troops killed in the Iran war, and removed 65 injured military members from the tally of those wounded-in-action.
Not in question is that 18 specific American military members have died in the conflict, each of whom have been identified by the Pentagon by name and memorialized as combat casualties in the war. The military does not generally identify troops wounded in combat, nor classify injuries.
Pentagon officials offered little explanation for the changes prior to the two-period update Saturday.
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A spokesperson for the Pentagon’s Personnel and Readiness office, which maintains DCAS, did not provide an explanation for the changes last week. U.S. Central Command officials said they do not “manage” or “own” the DCAS website.
Defense officials first indicated on Thursday that they were reclassifying the four soldiers killed and dozens of wounded in July due to Trump’s declared ceasefire. But a spokesperson for the Pentagon told multiple news outlets in a statement on Thursday that the shifting tallies stemmed from “temporary data disruptions” on the DCAS website that would soon be corrected.
Other U.S. troops killed in the conflict include six soldiers killed in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait attack; one soldier killed in an attack in Saudi Arabia; six airmen who died in a KC-135 crash in Iraq and a Navy helicopter pilot on the USS George H.W. Bush who died in a crash in the Arabian Sea.
Pentagon has questionable history of reporting wounded U.S. troops
The DCAS website discrepancy comes amid other reporting calling the Pentagon’s casualty rates into question. The Intercept first reported in April that casualty counts were being undervalued. Later that month, the outlet also noticed that 15 injured service members had been cut from the wounded in action totals.
This past week, before the latest figures, the Associated Press reported that the true number of Americans wounded in the Iran war is now over 500 and CBS reported that nearly 100 service members were injured from multiple Iranian airstrikes this month alone. Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said that 96% of service members had returned to duty. Parnell described the majority of injuries as “minor concussions.”
In a New York Times report Monday, a defense official blamed operational security as the reason for inconsistent or delayed casualty information.
David Lapan, a former Pentagon spokesperson from 2000 to 2003 and 2009 to 2011, said casualty counts help give the public a picture of the war.
“If service members are wounded in action, if they’re hurt, again, that is a measure for the public to know how this particular war is going,” he said. “In the absence of specific information from the department about these military operations, unfortunately, casualty reporting is one of the few ways that the public can judge how this war is going.”
