The Pentagon continues to peddle misleading U.S. casualty figures from the Iran war, even after The Intercept reported on what one defense official called a “casualty cover-up.”

Pressed for a more accurate count of U.S. personnel killed or injured during Operation Epic Fury, the Office of the Secretary of War provided a new tally that still undercounts American dead or wounded. This comes after U.S. Central Command ghosted The Intercept after sending lowball and outdated figures last week.

The continued undercount comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in which both sides have claimed victory. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine noted during a Wednesday press conference that the halt in fighting was only “a pause” in the conflict, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said U.S. forces were “prepared to restart at a moment’s notice.”

When questioned about stale numbers initially sent by CENTCOM, a Secretary of War spokesperson referred The Intercept to the new Operation Epic Fury webpage of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which generates casualty counts for Congress and the president.

DCAS counts 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war, listing out their names. Missing from 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.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine also recognized him while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

The Pentagon did not reply prior to publication to a request for comment on why Davius was missing from its casualty rolls.

The military’s count of those injured and wounded is even more flawed. Last week, multiple military personnel were injured when a U.S. F-15 was shot down over Iran and an A-10 Warthog crashed near the Straight of Hormuz. One of the Air Force officers from the F-15 who was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces during a Saturday night mission, for example, was “bleeding rather profusely” and “injured quite badly,” according to President Donald Trump. But CENTCOM has failed to provide The Intercept with updated casualty figures reflecting these and other wounded personnel. (The Pentagon’s DCAS may reflect these wounded, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to the system’s lack of detail.)

CENTCOM has not replied to more than a dozen requests for clarification over the last week since claiming to The Intercept in a March 30 email that “since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.”

On its website, the DCAS states that its goal “is to provide as accurate reporting of military casualties as possible.” Yet it posts conflicting counts of troops injured in Operation Epic Fury. On one page titled “Casualty Summary by Casualty Category,” DCAS lists 372 troops wounded in action — a count 23 percent higher than CENTCOM’s claims to The Intercept. On another page titled “Casualty Summary by Month and Service,” DCAS lists an even lower “grand total” of wounded in action: 357. Both counts were updated on April 8.

Putting aside its internal data discrepancies, the way the system defines casualties offers a skewed image of the conflict. Though the DCAS tracks “non-hostile” deaths — meaning individuals killed in accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. For example, the DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. What it doesn’t show — and what the CENTCOM casualty figures also exclude — are more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped out of the war zone for repairs. The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment on why DCAS tracks non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s impossible to know how many other casualties have been kept under wraps. After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, during Trump’s first term, the administration peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” Trump said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”

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 inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Trump claimed that “nobody was even injured” in the Saturday rescue mission that involved hundreds of Special Operations troops and other military personnel. During a Wednesday press conference, Hegseth echoed this, claiming there were “zero American casualties.” But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

“Not a single thing we’ve done has put an American troop in more of a harm’s way,” Hegseth said on Wednesday. But current and former Pentagon officials say the War Department failed to adequately protect U.S. personnel on bases across the Middle East, forcing troops to retreat to hotels and office buildings during Epic Fury.

U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”

While much of the focus on U.S. forces has centered on air and naval power, it is the Army — whose soldiers man the interceptor missile systems on those bases — that has suffered the most casualties: 251, according to DCAS statistics. The Army is only now seeking sensors designed to assess “blast overpressure,” the sudden onset of a pressure wave from explosions from enemy munitions and the blasts from weapon systems employed by soldiers themselves. It can lead to cognitive impairment and adverse effects on brain health, including traumatic brain injuries. Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” CENTCOM claims that the “vast majority” of injuries of the current war have been “minor.”

Of the 13 deaths counted in DCAS, six were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. A soldier also died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” If the USS Ford injuries were added to the Navy count, that service would take over the top spot with more than 264 wounded. DCAS also counts 39 Air Force personnel wounded in action and 19 Marines.

More injuries are on the horizon. It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. Last year, even before the war, an article in a professional journal published by Army University Press warned that the “relentless demands from training, overseas rotations, and deployments significantly affect servicemembers’ physical and mental health, leading to wellness issues and influencing military readiness. Continuous operations without adequate recovery intervals worsen stress-related illnesses, causing a hazardous balance between duty and health.”

The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran but money for long-term health care for veterans of the Iran war will likely push the ultimate price tag into the trillions of dollars.

Around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East where the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, have struck fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites — all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. If they file disability claims at the rate of the extremely short 1990 Gulf War — 37 percent of whom receive compensation today — this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes, according to Linda Bilmes, the co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”