Veterans groups have expressed concern over the ways the Pentagon is categorizing the casualties of the Iran war in its publicly available database meant to keep the public informed about the human costs of a given conflict.
That database, known as the Defense Casualty Analysis System, has the U.S. war in Iran that began on Feb. 28, 2026, into two separate conflicts, one from that date through July 6, called “Operation Epic Fury,” and another broadly labeled “Overseas Operations,” which spans from July 7 and is updated daily.
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Eighteen U.S. service members have been killed since the beginning of the conflict, 14 of whom were killed during Operation Epic Fury, as defined by DCAS, and four who were killed after that operation ended. It currently lists 417 troops wounded during Epic Fury, and then 268 more since July 7, for a total of 685 service members wounded.
“Since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the Department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility,” a War Department official told the Washington Examiner.
The July 7 date coincides with when President Donald Trump informed Congress that new hostilities with Iran began in a War Powers notification. The War Powers Act gives a president 60 days from the start of a conflict to get Congress to approve additional military operations, or if not, they have to end it or ask for a 30-day extension. The administration said the first 60-day period ended when the ceasefire commenced in April.
“Our Founders gave Congress war powers because they believed decisions about war demanded public debate and legislative oversight,” Concerned Veterans for America’s (CVA) Policy Director Tyler Koteskey told the Washington Examiner. “If the executive branch can set a dangerous precedent of simply reclassifying one conflict as a series of separate operations to circumvent war powers, Congress’s constitutional responsibility is severely weakened. Oversight and the power of the purse only work when Congress receives a clear and accurate accounting of the conflict.”
Questions about the database’s accuracy and Pentagon transparency first emerged in the aftermath of the deaths of four U.S. service members earlier this month during a resumption of sustained military engagement between the U.S. and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Three of them were killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Jordan, and the fourth was killed as U.S. forces tried to safely detonate a downed Iranian drone at a U.S. base in Iraq.
The Pentagon did not initially update the database for fallen service members after these four deaths were announced, and then once it was, it briefly reverted back to the previous number. That’s when the new “Overseas Operations” category was created.
“The concern is that today’s reporting decisions become tomorrow’s precedent,” CVA’s Strategic Director John Byrnes told the Washington Examiner. “If ‘Overseas Operations’ becomes a catch-all category, it becomes easier to blur the distinction between combat casualties, operational injuries, and other incidents. That makes it increasingly difficult for Congress and the American people to understand the real costs of military action.”
A Pentagon spokesperson initially attributed the confusion to “temporary data disruptions” and said the “site anomalies” were being resolved.
“When casualty reporting starts following political narratives instead of the reality experienced by our troops, we’ve got a problem,” Byrnes added. “You can’t reduce the cost of a war by dividing casualties into different categories per operation. Our service members deployed into one conflict, the American people witnessed one conflict, and that’s how it will ultimately be remembered.”
It’s not uncommon for one conflict to be broken into different phases. The war in Afghanistan was first under Operation Enduring Freedom, which lasted until 2014. Then there was Operation Freedom Sentinel, which continued until the war’s conclusion in August 2021.
“I think the big concern here is that this didn’t transition from Operation Epic Fury to another named operation that has the authorities, permissions, and funds tied to it. It just is this nebulous overseas operations,” Jerritt Lynn, the Director of Membership and Communications at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told the Washington Examiner.
“As an organization whose members overwhelmingly support congressional oversight into combat operations overseas, it brings on real concern about the overall strategic and operational nature of what’s happening, and the idea of just getting out of two decades of what they call forever wars and potentially entering another one,” Lynn, an Army veteran who served for more than 20 years, added.
A group of Senate Democrats on the Armed Services Committee wrote a letter to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week seeking more information, while a group of House Democrats who are veterans wrote to Trump this week about their “serious concerns about reports the Department of War is delaying, removing, or otherwise mischaracterizing the release of information about wounded and killed U.S. service members.”
Hegseth testified in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week to advocate the passing of the administration’s supplemental funding request of an additional $87 billion, $67 billion of which would go to the Pentagon.
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The secretary told lawmakers the projected cost of the war has grown to $37.5 billion, though he said that total includes some expected future costs through the end of the fiscal year. Previous estimates of the war’s cost from the department’s acting comptroller, Jay Hurst, have not included the costs of repairing U.S. bases damaged in the war because they don’t yet know how they want to rebuild them.
The U.S. military most recently carried out a round of airstrikes on Wednesday. During the two-hour round of strikes, U.S. forces hit “dozens” of targets, including “military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities.” This round of U.S. strikes was in response to a surprise Iranian barrage launched at a U.S. military base in Jordan a day earlier.
