Trump Can't Just Pretend Iran War Casualties Don't Count
However the government chooses to list war casualties, it doesn't change the fact that Americans are dead because of the administration's choices.
As his war against Iran stretches into a fifth month, President Donald Trump is almost certainly looking for good news. A new report suggests his administration may be fudging the number of total casualties.
Earlier this week on Truth Social, Trump listed four previous American wars alongside the two military engagements he has launched in his second term: the January raid that ousted Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and the war with Iran.
While the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Korean Peninsula each lasted multiple years and cost thousands of American lives, Trump bragged that his incursions were much more efficient, with Venezuela lasting only one day with no casualties, and only 18 dead so far from the war with Iran.
But within days, even that total was revised down.
"On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran," The New York Times reported. "By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war."
The Pentagon's casualty tracker currently lists seven deaths as a result of hostilities and seven that were "non-hostile," the result of accidents like the refueling aircraft that crashed in March, killing all six crewmembers onboard.
Four U.S. Army soldiers were killed in Jordan and Iraq last weekend; the Defense Department called the deaths "related to Iranian aggression." And yet the Pentagon doesn't include any of them as casualties of the conflict.
Why the revision? Acting Defense Department press secretary Joel Valdez told the Times it was the result of "temporary data disruptions" and would be fixed. But the paper, citing "three military officials," said the administration scrubbed the four most recent casualties "because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April."
"That ceasefire, however, didn't last," Peter Suderman wrote today in the Reason Roundup. "And earlier this month, Trump notified Congress that the United States was once again at war with Iran." In fact, Trump called the ceasefire "over" on July 8, more than a week before those four soldiers died.
Such a blatant attempt to cover up the administration's own war record is troubling.
It's perhaps also not new: In a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday, the 12 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee requested "a comprehensive accounting of the number of service members who have been killed, wounded, or injured in support of the operation." The lawmakers complained the Pentagon's site "has reported inconsistent casualty figures, raising additional questions about the transparency and reliability of the Department's public reporting and statements."
But no matter what Trump says, American soldiers are still dead as a direct result of the conflict he helped instigate. And it's not the first time he has used semantics to massage the truth about his war.
In March, just a month after hostilities began, Trump bragged that he purposely avoided using the word war to keep from triggering the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to end a conflict within 60 days or get Congress' approval. (After 60 days, Trump ultimately just pretended the conflict was over as a result of the April ceasefire.)
He needn't have bothered, of course: Despite taking numerous votes on what is clearly an unconstitutional war of choice, Congress has yet to successfully vote to end it. While the House voted this week on a (non-binding) resolution to end the war, an effort in the Senate failed the same day.
Ultimately, this is all just a game of semantics. However Trump and Hegseth choose to list them, it doesn't change the fact that Americans are dead as a result of their choices.