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The United States recorded at least 17 life-threatening casualties during the first phase of the war with Iran, according to newly obtained Defense Department records that provide the most detailed accounting yet of troops wounded in the conflict. More than 400 casualties were recorded between Feb. 28 and April 8, with Army personnel accounting for most of the casualties.
The data obtained by The War Horse details the specifics of troop injuries from the beginning of the war until the second week of April, when the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. Although U.S. military operations continued in the region and several more troops were wounded, hostilities remained subdued until earlier this month, when President Donald Trump declared the truce over on July 8.
The records, obtained by The War Horse through a Freedom of Information Act request, include service members’ branch, rank, injury type, and the date they were wounded. Each record accounts for an individual casualty incident, not a person, according to the DoD FOIA Analyst who processed the request, meaning that one person may have been injured multiple times.
More than 270 of the roughly 400 casualties were Army soldiers, and about one-third of those were reservists. Enlisted soldiers accounted for most Army casualties, including 57 sergeants and 53 specialists. But also wounded were 64 Army officers, including 20 captains, and 13 lieutenant colonels or colonels.
Head trauma, shrapnel, smoke: wounds of the Iran war
The U.S. military logged more than 400 casualties from the beginning of the conflict in late February through early April.
That level of detail is absent from public reporting in the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which provides monthly totals for the conflict with limited demographic data. Until now, those sparse updates were the only public statistical accounting of the war’s toll on U.S. troops.
“When you look at most of our wars, the Army does the vast majority of the fighting and dying,” said John McManus, a professor and military historian at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
While McManus said it is typical for more troops to be wounded than killed in modern warfare, the ratio in this conflict is particularly high.
The Navy reported 64 casualties, none of whom were classified as seriously injured. The Air Force recorded 51 casualties, and the Marine Corps recorded 19. Unlike the Army, the other branches did not list the type or cause of injury.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East region, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails from The War Horse requesting comment.
‘We broke all the tactical level rules’
The data obtained by The War Horse provides new details about the aftermath of several Iranian attacks, including some that had not been previously reported.
U.S. troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma.
At least 170 troops sustained head trauma between the start of the war to early April, according to the data.
One of them was an Army colonel who was sitting at a desk in an operations center in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, on March 1 when an Iranian drone slammed into the building. The strike killed six U.S. service members in what remains the deadliest attack of the war.
“Everybody inside the building was in a concussive blast,” said the colonel. The officer requested anonymity since they did not want members of their unit to face reprisal.
Two generals — later identified as Brig. Gen. Clint Barnes and Maj. Gen. Brad Hinson — also sustained head trauma that day, according to the data. General officers are rarely wounded in modern combat. The two senior officers have been criticized since then for ignoring intelligence warnings and abandoning their troops during the attack.
“We broke all the tactical-level rules,” the colonel said.
Days after the deadly attack in Kuwait, on March 3, as many news outlets were focused on drones striking the U.S. consulate in Dubai, 29 casualties were recorded in what the Pentagon classified as “enemy attack,” including one who was seriously injured. The military classifies an injury as serious when medical attention is required and death is “possible but not likely to occur within 72 hours.”
Central Command did not issue a press release or announce a large number of troops wounded in a single day. The next day, however, Central Command assured the public that the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile capabilities were “decimated.” Yet in the following weeks, roughly 200 more casualties occurred, some of them severe.
Two weeks later, on March 18, a total of 70 casualties occurred, according to the data. This large number of casualties for a single day was never reported by the Pentagon, which currently only provides public statistics of casualties by month. While more than two dozen were classified as “enemy attack,” the data on the rest of the injuries is missing. This occurred about 24 hours after a U.S.-Israeli air strike killed Ali Larijani, one of the most powerful figures in Iranian politics.
Hundreds of troops suffering from head trauma
A large portion of the wounded suffering from head trauma has led some military health experts to worry that traumatic brain injuries — caused by damage to the brain that can impact thinking, movement and emotion — could become the signature injury of this war, as in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most traumatic brain injuries sustained in the military can be classified as mild, said Michael McCrea, a neuropsychologist who studies traumatic brain injury at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
“That means there was no evidence of structural brain damage on brain imaging studies,” he said. “And the overwhelming majority of those individuals go on to have a complete recovery over a relatively short period of time.”
But even “mild” injuries can have long-term consequences, since the effects of a traumatic brain injury may not become apparent for weeks or even months.
“Many times when we think that there’s a relatively minor event, it turns out to be much more catastrophic than we ever thought it would be,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, an expert on military traumatic brain injury who served as Army surgeon general prior to his retirement in 2012. “Down the road, there may be decrements in cognition and memory and balance.”
Schoomaker described possible long-term issues with headaches, speech, language, and more.
“Remember, this thing that is lying between our ears is the most complex computer anyone has ever seen or studied,” he said.
The army colonel wounded at Port Shuaiba knows that firsthand. Since the attack, the colonel has experienced persistent headaches, vision problems, and other symptoms. Now, as a new wave of U.S. strikes against Tehran exposes additional American troops to Iranian counterattacks, the officer is watching closely.
“The Iran War’s kicking off again,” the colonel said in mid-July. “There’s gonna be more.”
By the end of July, more than 200 additional casualties had been added to a new table in the DoD casualties database, classified only as “Overseas Operations,” and four more had been killed.
