Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., are set to introduce legislation Thursday that aims to prevent the Pentagon from resetting a war’s casualty count by reclassifying the dead and wounded under new operational labels.
The move comes after the Pentagon revised how it accounts for U.S. casualties in the ongoing war with Iran.
ABC News was first to report last month that the Pentagon had begun changing how it publicly reports casualties from the Iran war, shifting them into a broad new category labeled “Overseas Operations” instead of maintaining a single cumulative tally, a move which could make it difficult to track the conflict’s human toll.
Duckworth, who served as an Army helicopter pilot in the Iraq War and suffered severe combat wounds, losing both legs and damaging her right arm, said she has lost confidence in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth being transparent about the war’s toll.
Historically, the number of U.S. troops dead and wounded has served as the best snapshot for the public accounting for a conflict’s cost and whether the fight was worth it.
“I don’t have the confidence in the Pentagon, and Hegseth in particular, being honest with the American people,” Duckworth said in an interview with ABC News.
The Pentagon’s change effectively splits the conflict into separate accounting buckets. The new category encompasses all U.S. military deaths and injuries across the area of responsibility of U.S. Central Command since July 7, according to a U.S. official, which includes the Middle East, Egypt and parts of Central and South Asia, rather than isolating casualties from the Iran conflict itself. The move separated that accounting from the tally of killed and wounded earlier in the war.
At the time, acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez attributed the changes to technical issues.
The Defense Casualty Analysis System serves as the federal government’s authoritative public record of war dead and wounded of major conflicts. The database is maintained using casualty reports submitted by the military services.
Separating individual phases of a war is unprecedented and can make it more difficult to produce a clear, cumulative accounting of the conflict’s human toll. As of Thursday morning, 18 U.S. troops had been killed, and at least 689 wounded since the war started in February.
Duckworth’s bill, if passed, would require the Pentagon to combine all casualty records for the Iran war into a single count and notify the next-of-kin of those killed of the corrections.
The accounting change stems from the Trump administration’s position that Operation Epic Fury, the Iran war’s original namesake, concluded in May and that the resumption of daily fighting on July 7 began a new phase of the conflict. Trump has asserted that the resumption of daily fighting resets the 60-day limit of waging war without congressional approval, an interpretation of the War Powers Resolution which has raised eyebrows among national security experts and lawmakers.
“I think commentators, other journalists, are right to say that the reason that we’re seeing this division between Operation Epic Fury and Overseas Operations is because of that legal fiction to get around the clear constraints of the War Powers Resolution,” said Katherine Yon Ebright, a war powers expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Though she cautioned the public-facing database is inherently imperfect, as conflicts have become more nebulous than wars in the 20th century.
Scott Anderson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that “at no point since February 28 have U.S. troops not been engaged in hostilities or situations where hostilities seem imminent in the vicinity of Iran and that’s actually what the War Powers Resolution cares about.”
Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the main investigative arm in that chamber, are investigating changes to the Defense Department’s casualty database and requested a complete record of every modification made to the Defense Department’s casualty database. They told the Pentagon to respond by Aug. 18.
“This timing raises the grave possibility that DoD created the new category to support an illegal attempt to defy the War Powers Act to continue a war,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, the ranking Democrat on the Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, wrote in a letter to Hegseth.
The Pentagon has released little information about U.S. troops killed or wounded in the conflict, offering few details about where casualties occurred or the circumstances surrounding them. It has also largely shielded the war from public scrutiny by declining to hold regular press briefings or answer sustained questions from reporters, an unusually opaque approach for a significant military campaign.
Since the Civil War, journalists have routinely embedded with American forces during major conflicts, providing independent accounts of battlefield operations, casualties and the experiences of the troops fighting them. By contrast, the Iran campaign has unfolded with unusually limited public visibility. The Pentagon has not held a formal press briefing on the war since early May.
“The Trump administration has broken so many norms of acceptable behavior,” Duckworth said. “We would never have had to introduce legislation like this under any previous president, because it just simply would not be done.”
The bill is cosigned by Sens. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo.; Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii; Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.; Michael Bennet, D-Colo.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.; Andy Kim, D-N.J.; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.; and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
