On July 26, the U.S. Department of Defense quietly launched a new statistical category on its website, the “Defense Casualty Analysis System,” which splits US military casualties in the Iran war by different time periods, making the death toll appear to shrink on the surface.
Turkey’s Anadolu Agency noticed that this new category, dubbed “Overseas Operations,” records US casualties since July 7. So far, it shows 4 US service members killed and 207 wounded—including 3 who died in Jordan and 1 in northern Iraq.
If you add this data to the “Epic Fury Operations” page, the combined tally since February 28, when the US and Israel started the war with Iran, comes to 18 US deaths and 624 injuries.
This adjustment comes as the Pentagon faces growing scrutiny over its transparency. On July 23, The New York Times reported that an earlier Iranian attack this month left dozens of US troops wounded and damaged aircraft—but the Pentagon didn’t disclose it. Plus, the official death toll for the Iran war on its site had already been quietly lowered from 18 to 14.
CNN also called out the “constantly changing” numbers in the casualty database, further eroding trust in how the military reports its losses.
In response, 12 Democratic senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a formal letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on July 23, demanding an explanation for the shifting data.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell previously said the department is fixing “systematic errors” in the Defense Casualty Analysis System.
But so far, no clear reason has been given for why recent US casualties were moved to this new category.