TEHRAN — Donald Trump once dismissed the six-month-old war with Iran as “small potatoes.” But the potatoes keep getting bigger.

The Pentagon has quietly added another 37 US service members to its public tally of personnel wounded during the Iran war, without explaining when, where or how they were injured. The latest update brings the number of wounded listed in the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) to 861, adding 29 Navy sailors and eight Marines to the previously reported figure.

A Navy official confirmed that the 29 sailors had returned to duty but provided no details about their injuries. The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not publicly identify any recent attack or incident that would account for the additional casualties. The Washington Post reported that Pentagon officials did not respond to requests for an explanation.

The latest unexplained adjustment is only the newest episode in a growing series of discrepancies surrounding the administration’s accounting of the human and material cost of the conflict.

A casualty count that keeps changing

The Pentagon’s public casualty figures have repeatedly changed during the conflict.

On September 18, The Washington Post reported that six US officials familiar with the Defense Department’s internal accounting said at least 22 American service members had died in the Middle East since the beginning of the Iran war on February 28 — four more than the 18 deaths then listed in the Pentagon’s public database. A sixth official put the number at 23.

The officials stressed that not all of the additional deaths could necessarily be attributed directly to combat with Iran, but said they involved U.S. personnel in the region amid the ongoing hostilities. Three U.S. contractors were also reported to have died since combat operations began. The circumstances of the additional military deaths had not been publicly disclosed.

The Pentagon subsequently added another death to its public database, bringing the disclosed total to 19. The Army identified the service member as Capt. Bianca C. Wilkerson, who died on September 18 following a medical emergency while traveling to the Middle East.

That still left a gap between the public database and the higher figures provided by officials.

Four dead — then removed from the tally

The most striking episode occurred in July.

Four U.S. troops killed during renewed fighting with Iran were temporarily removed from the Pentagon’s official Iran-war casualty count. Three soldiers had been killed when an American base in Jordan was struck by Iranian missiles and drones on July 17; another died in Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone.

The Pentagon’s public database initially showed 18 deaths. It then dropped to 14, while the number of wounded also fell sharply.
Pentagon officials attributed the sudden changes to “anomalies” and “temporary data disruptions.”

The four deaths and more than 200 wounded personnel later reappeared in a new DCAS category called “Overseas Operations,” rather than under “Operation Epic Fury,” the administration’s designation for the Iran campaign. The Pentagon subsequently said that Operation Epic Fury had ended and that casualties associated with renewed fighting were therefore being recorded separately.

Whatever the administrative explanation, the change created a basic problem for the public: a war casualty database was no longer presenting all casualties connected to the conflict under the same heading.

 Nearly 100 injured — but missing from the database

The discrepancy became even more difficult to explain in July.

On July 20, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that nearly 100 US service members had suffered some degree of injury since July 7 and that 96 percent had returned to duty.

Yet those injuries did not appear in the DCAS totals at the time. The database still showed 14 deaths and did not reflect the nearly 100 additional injuries acknowledged by the Pentagon.

Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats subsequently demanded an explanation, noting that the Pentagon’s own public statements and its casualty database were reporting different realities.

The senators asked the Defense Department to disclose how CENTCOM decides whether an injury is significant enough to be publicly reported, how many injuries had been omitted because personnel quickly returned to duty, and whether injuries from attacks in Jordan were included in DCAS.

Attacks and injuries that were not publicly announced

The questions were particularly significant because U.S. officials had acknowledged that American forces in Jordan had been attacked several times before the July 17 strike.

The Senate inquiry specifically asked the Pentagon how many service members had been injured in three Iranian attacks on US forces in Jordan during the week preceding the better-known July 17 attack, whether those injuries had been entered into DCAS and who authorized the decision not to publicly disclose the attacks or associated injuries.

This raised a broader question: how many injuries can occur during a war without appearing in the public record if the personnel involved return to duty quickly?

The Lincoln’s hidden human cost

The latest revelations also extend beyond battlefield casualties.

On September 23, CBS News reported that the Navy had acknowledged eight suicide attempts among personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group during its months-long deployment.

The figure covered sailors assigned to the carrier, its air wing and accompanying destroyers. A defense official told CBS that two of the eight attempts occurred during active fighting with Iran.

The strike group had spent more than 250 consecutive days at sea during the year, while families had raised concerns about food shortages, supply problems, plumbing failures and deteriorating mental health among personnel.

The Navy has disputed suggestions that there was an increase in suicide attempts and said personnel had access to counselors, chaplains and other support services. Nevertheless, the disclosure added another dimension to the cost of a conflict that officials have repeatedly sought to portray as limited.

From “small potatoes” to a growing bill

Trump described the conflict as “small potatoes” on September 4 while defending Vice President JD Vance’s characterization that the fighting was no longer a war. At the time, Trump acknowledged 18 US deaths and said the conflict had cost taxpayers more than $37.5 billion.

Since then, the publicly disclosed casualty count has risen, officials have reported that the real death toll is higher, and dozens of previously unreported wounded personnel have appeared in the Pentagon database.

The administration’s accounting has also faced questions over the classification of casualties, the reporting of injuries and the disclosure of attacks on US forces.

The issue has therefore become larger than a dispute over numbers. It is about whether the American public and Congress can obtain a consistent account of the human cost of a war being financed by US taxpayers.

Growing pressure inside Washington

The administration has faced increasingly vocal demands for transparency.

In July, all Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee demanded a “full and accurate accounting” of those killed, wounded or injured in connection with Operation Epic Fury. They cited discrepancies between Pentagon statements and DCAS figures and said the inconsistencies undermined confidence in the government’s accounting of the war’s human cost.

In August, Sen. Tammy Duckworth and 17 Democratic senators introduced legislation aimed at preventing the Pentagon from arbitrarily recategorizing an ongoing conflict and requiring restoration of casualty records associated with the Iran war.

After the latest report that at least 22 service members may have died, Duckworth and Rep. Pat Ryan renewed their demand for Congress to pass the legislation. The proposed law would require more frequent public casualty reporting and prohibit the manipulation of casualty records through changes in the designation of an ongoing operation.

The criticism has not been confined to Democrats. Questions over the shifting casualty categories have also drawn attention from Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Thomas Massie, who questioned the logic of treating renewed fighting as a separate conflict for casualty-accounting purposes.

For an administration that has repeatedly emphasized the limited scale and cost of its military campaign against Iran, the expanding list of unexplained injuries, disputed death figures, reclassified casualties and previously undisclosed incidents presents an increasingly awkward arithmetic.

The “small potatoes” are getting harder to keep small.