Amid a fragile ceasefire in the U.S. war on Iran, the Pentagon is playing a numbers game with American casualty statistics, adding and subtracting from the count as questions about the human toll mount.<\/p>\n
On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the \u201cgrand total\u201d of wounded and dead at 411.<\/p>\n
The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.<\/p>\n
Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the \u201cduty officer\u201d could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. \u201cAs soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,\u201d said one of them.<\/p>\n
A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department\u2019s casualty rolls.<\/p>\n
Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon\u2019s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has called a \u201ccasualty cover-up<\/a>.\u201d The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks \u201cdeceased, wounded, ill or injured<\/a>\u201d service members for\u00a0Congress and the president is missing hundreds of known casualties.<\/p>\n \u201cThese numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don\u2019t want the public to have them says something,\u201d the official said. \u201cThat\u2019s the definition of a cover-up.\u201d<\/p>\n The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. \u201cWe got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,\u201d Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.<\/p>\n Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.<\/p>\n Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon\u2019s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. While DCAS provides a running tally of \u201cnon-hostile\u201d deaths \u2014 meaning those who died from accidents or by illness \u2014 it doesn\u2019t include \u201cnon-hostile\u201d injuries. The DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than\u00a0200 sailors<\/a>\u00a0treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the\u00a0USS\u00a0Gerald R. Ford<\/a> which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to \u201cproject combat power<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0The numbers also don\u2019t include a sailor who suffered a\u00a0non-combat-related injury<\/a>\u00a0aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in \u201cstrike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury\u201d on March 25.<\/p>\n \u201cMy concern is why that piece is now missing.\u201d<\/p>\n Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. \u201cThat should have been entered into DCAS,\u201d she said. \u201cMy concern is why that piece is now missing.\u201d<\/p>\n A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon \u201chad to hide.\u201d<\/p>\n For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.<\/p>\n It\u2019s well known<\/a> that when operations\u2019 tempo increases, such as during a war, troops\u2019 mental and physical health<\/a> suffers. And the military\u2019s own studies have shown \u2014 as a 2025 article in Military Review<\/a>, the U.S. Army\u2019s professional journal, put it \u2014 the \u201cprofound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.<\/p>\n During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study<\/a> found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis<\/a> in Military Medicine observed, \u201cdisease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will always honor the fallen,\u201d Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced<\/a> at a Pentagon press conference last week. \u201cAnd the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.\u201d<\/p>\n DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names<\/a>.\u00a0But missing from Cooper\u2019s count and the Pentagon tally is Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6, 2026.<\/p>\n \u201cHe passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,\u201d said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a\u00a0memorial service<\/a>\u00a0for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,\u00a0also recognized Davius <\/a>while \u201chonoring our fallen\u201d from the war.<\/p>\n For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.<\/p>\n During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. \u201cWe lost 13 men,\u201d he said on CNBC<\/a>. \u201cBut if somebody would have said, \u2018We\u2019ve done this and obliterated that country \u2014 obliterated it \u2014 and we lost 13 men,\u2019 people would\u2019ve said, \u2018That\u2019s not possible.\u2019\u201d According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.<\/p>\n We\u2019re independent of corporate interests \u2014 and powered by members. Join us. <\/p>\n Join Our Newsletter <\/p>\n Thank You For Joining! <\/p>\n \n Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. <\/p>\n Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept?\n <\/p>\n By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing<\/a> immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan \u2014 an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.<\/p>\n After an\u00a0Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. \u201cNo Americans were harmed in last night\u2019s attack by the Iranian regime,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0at the time. \u201cWe suffered no casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An\u00a0inspector general report<\/a>\u00a0released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because \u201cDoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.\u201d<\/p>\n Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops\u2019 injuries. \u201cWe did get pushback from the White House of \u2018Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?\u2019\u201d said Farah<\/a>. \u201cThe White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.\u201d She added, \u201cAnd I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.\u201d<\/p>\n On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan war. \u201cIn 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,\u201d he said. But an Associated Press investigation<\/a> found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump\u2019s first term when there were no combat deaths. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 \u201cnon-hostile\u201d deaths during Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n
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