(CNN) — The Pentagon’s website that tracks war casualties remains incorrect nearly a day after the totals for US service member deaths and injuries in the war with Iran were reduced in what Defense Department officials called a “data disruption.”
Democratic members of the Senate sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth late Thursday demanding answers as to why the website was having issues and asked for a full accounting of war casualties.
Four deaths and dozens of injuries disappeared from the totals on Thursday after the Defense Casualty Analysis System website had correctly listed the total number of US troops killed in the war at 18 earlier in the week. Four soldiers died – three in Jordan and one in Iraq – as part of operations over the weekend.
President Donald Trump attended the dignified transfer of the remains of those four service members on Wednesday at Dover Air Base in Delaware. The president confirmed the 18 total deaths during a Thursday press appearance but downplayed their significance.
“One is too many, but it’s 18, whereas in Vietnam, we lost 200,000,” he said. The Pentagon’s official tally for total deaths in Vietnam is 58,220.
The 14 that were still listed on the DCAS website as of Friday appeared to include a sailor who died in early July after the helicopter he was in crashed in the Arabian Sea.
Pentagon officials blamed technical issues and denied there was an intentional effort to mask the war’s toll after media reports emerged on the sudden drop.
“The Department of War is aware of temporary data disruptions on the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) website,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a post on X. “These site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”
CNN asked the Pentagon on Friday why the numbers had not been corrected, and whether the Defense Department would be able to fix the underlying issue so that the numbers would be accurate in the future. The Pentagon did not reply by the time of publication.
CNN, which tracks the DCAS website, had seen repeated glitches this week with totals fluctuating.
The Defense Department has been slow to disclose injuries during the war, with officials pointing to security needs. On Monday, Parnell had acknowledged that “nearly 100 service members” had been injured in the war since July 7, at a time when dozens of those injuries did not appear in the DCAS totals.
The twelve Democratic Senators who serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee signed a letter Thursday asking Hegseth for answers as to what was causing inaccuracies in the DCAS system, and demanding a full accounting of casualties.
“The American people, Congress, service members, and their families are entitled to a full and accurate accounting of the human costs of war,” the letter said. “The information currently available to the public suggests that the Department has not consistently provided timely and comprehensive public casualty reporting throughout the conflict.”
Even when seemingly functioning properly, the DCAS data appears to show a significant delay in updates. A Pentagon official previously said that “it can take several days or even weeks for an injury to be documented in military systems” due to medical evaluation and review requirements. The official, however, told CNN that the DCAS database is “regularly updated.”
Hegseth has previously been critical of media coverage about service member deaths, saying at a March news conference that, “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.”
“I get it,” he added. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.”
Hegseth did not mention service member deaths to open his testimony on Tuesday, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine mentioned the four who had died over the weekend as he sat next to Hegesth, a pattern consistent with their periodic joint press conferences during the early days of the war.
Davis Winkie’s work at CNN is supported by a partnership between Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners (JFP). CNN retains full editorial control of the reporting.
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