The Department of Defense removed four deceased U.S. service members from its public casualty tracker for the Iran conflict overnight, lowering the number of publicly listed fatalities.
The removal, first reported by The New York Times, lowered the Pentagon’s reported count of U.S. service members killed in the Iran conflict from 18 on Wednesday to 14 on Thursday.
The Defense Department attributed the removal to “temporary data disruptions on the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) website” on DAY, though the 14 casualties figure remains on the site. But sources told the Times that the Trump administration decided to remove the last four casualties “because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a ceasefire in the war in April.”
The Defense Casualty Analysis System, a public Pentagon database intended to provide an official accounting of military casualties, is used by journalists, researchers and the public to track the human toll of U.S. conflicts. The unexplained revisions raise questions about the agency’s official public accounting of the war’s death toll.
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Asked about the removal, the White House referred NOTUS to the Department of Defense, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Online though, senior administration officials have denied the soldiers were purposely removed.
“This is one of the worst instances of the Fake News media manufacturing lies out of thin air for absolutely no reason at all but to cause distress among the American people,” Sean Parnell, who serves as chief Pentagon spokesperson and assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, posted on X.
The four service members removed from the list were killed during the latest round of hostilities in the region, including 25-year-old 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan of Hawaii, 28-year-old Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad of New York, and 19-year-old Pvt. Isabella Gonzales of Texas, who were killed in an Iranian ballistic missile attack in Jordan last week.
Thirty-year-old Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton of North Carolina, who died while conducting a controlled demolition of an Iranian one-way attack drone in Iraq, was also removed from the list.
The tracker has also lowered the number of wounded soldiers in combat from 447 to 420.
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, and other Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth and other Pentagon officials on Thursday questioning the inconsistencies between the agency’s reported numbers and other official statements. They requested detailed answers by the end of the month, including an exact casualty breakdown and an explanation of the discrepancies.
“Erasing their sacrifices is a disgraceful attempt by this fragile President to minimize the costs of his illegal war,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), a member of the Armed Services Committee, posted on Friday.
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