As last week got underway, there was plenty of debate about the war with Iran, but there was no debate about how many U.S. troops had died as part of the conflict: 18 American service members had made the ultimate sacrifice.
By midweek, however, the Defense Department decided to change its official online tally on the number of fatalities: 18 was reduced to 14, reportedly because administration officials decided that the most recent deaths occurred after Donald Trump declared a cease-fire, so they literally did not count.
Not surprisingly, veterans and the loved ones of the fallen soldiers were not pleased, but a Pentagon spokesperson argued that this was “a non-story” that reflected “temporary data disruptions” and “site anomalies.” Joel Valdez, an acting press secretary at the DOD, suggested that the website would be quickly fixed.
A few days later, the Defense Department’s website is clearly different, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s fixed. The New York Times reported:
Facing criticism that it had minimized the number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in the war with Iran, the Pentagon on Sunday changed the way it reports casualties as it announced a higher number of wounded service members this month.
In an unusual new accounting method, casualties since July 7, when the cease-fire began unraveling and fighting escalated, are not listed on a Pentagon website with others since the war began, but rather on a new webpage labeled generically as “overseas operations casualties.”
As of this writing, the Defense Department’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks war casualties, continues to show a total of 14 fatalities, despite the fact that it showed 18 fatalities less than a week ago. This dovetails with a new Pentagon website, which lists “overseas operations casualties,” and which documents the other four servicemembers who’ve died as part of the war with Iran.
To know how many American troops have died as part of the combat operations, we’re apparently supposed to visit both websites and then do the math.
This leads to one unavoidable question — why in the world is Team Trump doing this? — which the administration has not yet answered.
I continue to think this is reminiscent of the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, complete with contradictions, deceptions, efforts to downplay avoidable deaths and clumsy efforts to manipulate politically inconvenient data.
As for the other data on the new “overseas operations casualties” website, it also shows that 207 U.S. servicemembers have been wounded in action, for a total of 624 since the war began on Feb. 28, which is higher than previous Pentagon estimates.
The administration was already facing accusations about failing to present a full and accurate picture of American troops’ injuries as part of the war with Iran. Those accusations are poised to grow quite a bit louder.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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