As the Iran War Escalates, Is the U.S. Hiding Its Toll?

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**Michael Barbaro** (0:32)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Monday, the war in Iran escalated in dangerous new ways, drawing in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia as the Trump administration reeled from the Iranian killing of US service members in Jordan. Today, my colleague, Pentagon reporter Eric Schmitt, talks us through the latest attacks and how they've coincided with the decision by the US military to disclose less and less about the conflict. It's Tuesday, July 21st.
Eric, welcome back. Always good to have you.

**Eric Schmitt** (1:28)
Thank you, Michael. Good to be here.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:30)
So we want to talk to you about what feels like a very sad new milestone in the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the past week or so, which is the death of multiple US service members in an attack over the weekend. Can you just tell us exactly what happened there?

**Eric Schmitt** (1:54)
Yeah, so the attack really culminates more than a week of exchanges, hostile exchanges between Iran and the United States as the ceasefire really falls apart. And on Friday, sadly, a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones. Slipped through the air defenses at a major air base in Jordan, where US forces are stationed, and at least two, there may have been a third, US. Army soldiers were killed.
There were several others who were badly injured, who were evacuated to Jordanian hospitals, and several others wounded who were able to return to duty soon enough. But this, Michael, was significant because these two and possibly three deaths in Jordan, along with the death of another Army soldier in Iraq that happened the following day, when they were detonating an Iranian drone, brings the total number of Americans killed in the war to 17

**Michael Barbaro** (3:05)
And, Eric, what do we know about these service members who were killed in this attack in Jordan?

**Eric Schmitt** (3:12)
So the Army soldiers who were killed in this attack were members of an air defense unit that had been positioned in Jordan to help protect the base. And it's led some US officials to speculate that the Iranians in targeting this base were also trying to specifically target the defenders of the base, the people who had the Patriot anti-missile batteries and such.
We don't have proof of that yet, but that is one suggestion that investigators are looking at, that the Iranians, as they try and figure out ways to evade American air defenses, are actually also trying to knock out the very soldiers who manned those defenses.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:49)
Well, I'm glad you're raising the question of Iran's military sophistication in this moment because what I think struck many of us about this attack beyond the obvious tragedy of these soldiers dying is that so long after President Trump claimed that Iran's military had been destroyed, that's the word he used, destroyed by American military forces, it's becoming clear that Iran's military capabilities remain robust and lethal.

**Eric Schmitt** (4:19)
That's right. I mean, obviously, more than 13,000 strikes that the United States took in the first part of the war very badly damaged and even decimated some parts of the Iranian military, the Air Force and the Navy, for instance.
But the Iranians have always retained large numbers of attack drones, large numbers of the boats that lay mines, and large numbers of these missiles that they're now firing at the United States. They were literally able to dig out from some of the bomb sites, the missile launchers, the missiles themselves, some of which they're now launching back at the United States. So the US is having to re-strike some of these targets in this kind of tit-for-tat exchange we've seen every day now for over a week.

**Michael Barbaro** (5:03)
Is it possible that Iran used the ceasefire to restock and essentially reorganize itself for these kinds of attacks?

**Eric Schmitt** (5:13)
It's not only possible, it's almost certain. American officials have privately and even grudgingly publicly acknowledged the Iranians have been able to use this time the last several months to kind of dig out some of their sites that were buried, rebuild some of their missile and drone capability in particular. Because those are really the two threats that can both close the Strait of Hormuz as well as threaten American troops and others that are around the region.