Pentagon

The Pentagon's casualty reporting has proven the least reliable public figure of the war. It revised the US wounded count to 365 on 4 April, then cut the death toll to 14 on 24 July while the wounded figure fell from 482 to 420 without explanation the same day . A new count, backdated to 7 July, followed on 30 July.

Each revision has been attributed only to unspecified data problems rather than a named cause. By 4 August, Congress was asking the department for a full change log documenting when each figure moved and why , after the House and Senate had both failed on 23 July to bind the President by statute over the war's Conduct.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Congress the campaign's first official cost estimate, $37.5 billion, without a breakdown of obligated, appropriated or incremental spending . Weeks earlier the department had weighed renaming the operation, from Epic Fury toward a Sledgehammer or Overseas Operations designation, a change that would reset the clock Congress uses under the War Powers Resolution to force a vote on ending US involvement .

The department eventually recategorised the campaign's casualties under the new designation on 26 July, a move one member of Congress publicly criticised the same day as an attempt to obscure the true toll rather than simply reclassify paperwork.