Iran War Casualties Increase as Pentagon Quietly Changes Its Math

The Pentagon has once again changed the Iran war casualty number, adding 142 new wounded soldiers to its count over the weekend—bringing the total to 624 wounded service members and 18 deaths.

The way the Pentagon is reporting the numbers is tricky, splitting the casualty tolls into two separate pages. One page on “Operation Epic Fury” has a casualty count starting on February 28, and another page, titled “Overseas Operations,” begins the count on July 7, when the short-lived ceasefire fell apart and bombings ramped back up. The move raises concerns that the Pentagon is willfully obscuring the numbers to make its failure of a forever war look better on paper.

The Pentagon faced backlash last week after it reduced its casualty totals from 482 wounded and 18 dead. And while Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez told media the reduction was due to “temporary data disruptions,” the Trump administration has refused to include four soldiers killed in recent days in the page on Operation Epic Fury’s death toll.

The Pentagon has been credibly accused of downplaying the severity and number of casualties in the war on Iran. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to an Iranian strike on a U.S. makeshift operations center in Kuwait as “a squirter,” and later whined that coverage of dead troops was only intended to “make the president look bad.” Six soldiers were killed in that strike, with over 30 hospitalized for burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma. And last month, the Pentagon classified soldiers who suffered severe brain injuries in that attack as having “minor” injuries, causing their families to speak out against that decision.

This lack of transparency from the Pentagon is strategic, and ultimately foolish. This war is only dragging on as it grows increasingly unpopular. That will undoubtedly lead to more wounded soldiers and more body bags. Those are impossible to hide.

Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, blamed the Biden administration Sunday for depleting the country’s weapons stockpile—but then denied reporting that the country’s weapons stockpile was depleted.

Appearing on NBC News’s Meet the Press, Waltz was asked to respond to a report that the Pentagon had started rationing certain defense weapons in its campaign against Iran as its military assets diminished.

“Is America backing away from a larger military attack because its military stockpile has been depleted?” asked host Kristen Welker.

Waltz insisted that President Donald Trump’s administration had “inherited a depleted situation” from the previous administration, pointing to the war in Ukraine and U.S. strikes against the Houthis, which were also conducted by the Trump administration.

Waltz claimed, however, that the U.S. military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be.”

“The people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail,” he added.

Waltz couldn’t seem to keep straight whether the reporting was utter “nonsense” or leaked government information punishable by prison time.

Representative Ted Lieu pushed back on Waltz’s finger-pointing in a post on X. The California Democrat noted that many of the weapons that are reportedly running dry were not used by the previous administration in the conflicts Waltz cited.

For example, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses missiles that have become severely depleted and are incredibly difficult to replace were never provided to Ukraine, Lieu wrote. And the U.S. has used more Patriot missiles in the last five months of fighting than what was ever sent to Ukraine.

“Stop falsely blaming others and take responsibility for the disastrous Iran war,” Lieu wrote.

The Republican Party no longer sees Donald Trump as its golden goose.

With midterms around the corner, the president’s allies are reportedly urging Republican candidates to break from Trump’s rhetoric on the Iran war in order to save their election odds.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”

The Iran war has done nothing good for America in the 21 weeks since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 600 others. It has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. As a result, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, with trust and loyalty rattled even within his base, which is reportedly losing patience with the unyielding violence.

The White House is now basically cutting its losses, allowing midterm-bound Republicans the opportunity to save themselves from Trump’s sinking ship.

“There is less paranoia and more autonomy,” a Republican strategist in Michigan familiar with the national and regional communications of the party told MS NOW. “[Trump] is still doing the work for the incumbents, but giving them space without lashing out.”

Another Republican operative told the network that “nuance has been adopted in Trump 2.0 that wasn’t in 1.0,” noting that if a candidate is in a state “where he can get someone better and more loyal, he’ll do it,” but “if you’re in a state where you’re the best he can get, there’s a deeper comprehension of that reality.”

A fourth GOP operative familiar with the White House’s strategy referred to debates on Iran as a “Democrat trap.”

“If a candidate lets their race become a referendum on Iran, that’s a mistake,” they said.

President Trump spent his entire Sunday on a bender, posting nonstop AI images to his Truth Social page for more than six hours.

It started at 11:16 a.m. with an AI image of CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins as transgender model Dylan Mulvaney holding cans of Bud Light, and escalated from there. Bruce Springsteen, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Trump’s longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell were among those targeted in his posting binge. He also posted several flattering photos of himself in mock-up movie posters and, in one instance, standing next to former President John F. Kennedy.

None of the images had any text attached to them, and they were interspersed with some of his campaign photos and pro-Iran war propaganda. At one point, he posted nine Iran war memes three times in a row in the span of just over an hour.

It’s pretty clear that the octogenarian president is experiencing cognitive decline and had some kind of episode Sunday. It’s been evident throughout his second term as president, but as of late, he’s thrown a tablet across a room after a bad phone call with world leaders, rambled about the history of paper clips in the middle of a speech, and zoned out in the middle of a photo op. It’s a terrifying thought to realize that we still have two years of Trump occupying the Oval Office with his mental state only growing worse.

In January, President Trump told the media that his deadly extrajudicial strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean had maritime drug flow “down 97 percent.” New reporting from The Washington Post shows that was a lie. After over 60 strikes, more than 200 people are dead with no trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has confirmed that the flow of cocaine into the U.S. has not been impeded at all.

Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.

“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”

“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”

In April, just over seven months into the strikes, Trump wrote that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” It’s unclear where he got that number from.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people. And if so, they’ve been killed for no reason, serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.