Leon Panetta, a former US Defense Secretary and CIA Director, says the Pentagon is acting "shameful" by keeping information about American casualties in the Iran war away from the public. He told the Guardian there is a "deliberate effort" to "withhold information from the American people" (The Guardian).

Panetta knows this process well. He ran the Pentagon during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he held weekly press briefings during those conflicts. As of late July 2026, the Pentagon had not held a press briefing for two-and-a-half months. The last one appeared to have been on July 21, 2026, when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine addressed civilian casualties (The Guardian; defense.gov).

The US and Iran have been fighting for five months. A ceasefire (a temporary stop to the fighting) between the two countries collapsed earlier in July 2026, and both sides have been attacking each other every day since. US Central Command carried out a wave of strikes against dozens of Iranian targets on July 13, 2026 (defense.gov), and released footage of strikes on alleged Iranian military facilities on July 20 (Middle East Eye/Facebook). The US military also targeted Iran's Shalamcheh border crossing with Iraq, Reuters reported on July 24 (Reuters/Facebook.

The human cost is going up. As of the weekend before July 25, 18 US troops had been killed in the war and roughly 430 had been injured. On around July 21, the Pentagon said that 100 service members had been injured since July 7, but that 96% had returned to duty (The Guardian).

The way the Pentagon has handled those numbers has drawn criticism. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon initially failed to share casualty numbers and only later posted them on social media. Pentagon officials called the Times article "baseless and malicious." The Times also reported that the Pentagon's website had lowered the number of troop deaths from 18 to 14. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the discrepancy was caused by "a temporary data disruption" (The Guardian).

Ned Price, a former State Department spokesperson and former deputy to the US representative to the United Nations, agreed with Panetta. Price said the information blackout is about "shielding the American people from the true and total cost of this war" (The Guardian).

A lot has changed at the Pentagon. After Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, the Pentagon was renamed the Department of War. Since then, the department removed major news outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Politico from their long-held office spaces, replacing them with Trump-friendly media such as Breitbart, One America News Network, and the New York Post (The Guardian). The war, called Operation Epic Fury, was publicly announced by Hegseth and Caine on March 2, 2026, when they outlined the operation's goals (defense.gov). US and Israeli forces had previously carried out joint strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, with Parnell briefing on their success in July 2025 (defense.gov).

The broader context here is a clash between how wars have traditionally been communicated to the public and an administration that has changed the Pentagon's relationship with the press. During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, regular Pentagon briefings served as a main way for the public to stay informed and hold leaders accountable, even when the information shared was incomplete or disputed. Stopping that practice for ten weeks during an active war, with daily strikes and rising casualties, removes a tool that Congress, allied governments, and the public have relied on to understand how a war is going. The website's death-count discrepancy, whether caused by a data problem or not, adds to the credibility gap that Panetta and Price are pointing to.

What is still unclear is whether pressure from Congress or legal action by media organizations will force the Pentagon to resume regular briefings, or whether this approach will continue for the rest of Operation Epic Fury. The 96% return-to-duty figure the Pentagon offered on July 21 is the kind of detail that regular briefings would help explain. Without that forum, it stands alone, unexamined.