Pentagon Changes How It Reports Casualties in Iran War

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.” This means that a full accounting of the overall casualties requires adding numbers from separate web pages.

Under the new system, the Defense Casualty Analysis System restored the deaths of four soldiers killed last weekend in the war that had been removed from the website — but in a separate, unexplained category. The change also raised the number of those wounded to 142 more than were previously reported by the Pentagon since July 7.