The base in Jordan where two American service members were killed on July 17 had already been hit once that week. About 20 troops were wounded in that first strike. The Pentagon did not announce it at the time.

That is the substance of reporting published Monday by the New York Times, and it is worth separating carefully from a related but different practice.

Two different things

CENTCOM routinely withholds the names of service members killed until 24 hours after their families have been notified. That is long-standing policy, it exists for the families, and it is not controversial.

Not disclosing that a base was attacked and 20 people were hurt is a different matter. It concerns whether the public and Congress are told the scale of what is happening, not whether a grieving family learns of a death from a news bulletin.

What is on the record

The confirmed picture from the past week: an Iranian attack on July 17 killed two U.S. service members in Jordan and left a third missing, with unidentified remains later recovered at the site and still being examined. A separate soldier died in Iraq during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone.

Of those wounded in Jordan, four were evacuated to hospitals and have since been discharged, and others treated for minor injuries returned to duty.

The cumulative figures, according to Pentagon data, run to at least 427 service members injured since the operation began in late February, alongside 14 confirmed deaths before the Jordan and Iraq losses.

This explains something we flagged

The Herald reported on Sunday that the total number of Americans killed in this war could not be stated with confidence, because military statements over a single weekend produced different cumulative figures and independent trackers produced lower ones.

The arithmetic above is why. Fourteen confirmed deaths plus two in Jordan gives 16. Adding the soldier killed in Iraq gives 17. Counting the missing service member, or not, moves it again. Both numbers were circulating because both were defensible depending on what was being counted, and nobody was reconciling them publicly.

That is not the same as fabrication. It is what happens when casualty accounting is released piecemeal.

The disputed part

Beyond the July incident, the adversarial reporting on this war's casualty figures has come substantially from The Intercept, which reported in April that the Defense Casualty Analysis System, the database used to inform Congress and the public, was missing large categories of injured personnel, and that on one occasion the recorded wounded-in-action total was revised downward without explanation.

Readers should weigh the outlet's stance, which is consistently critical of the Defense Department, and also note that its specific findings concern a public database whose numbers can be checked.

The Pentagon's explanation

There is a real technical defense, and it deserves stating properly rather than dismissing.

The military classifies a wounded service member as "seriously injured" or "very seriously injured" only where there is a risk of death within 72 hours. A soldier with a concussion, hearing loss or shrapnel wounds who is not in danger of dying does not meet that threshold, and so does not appear in the category most people would assume covers them. That is a definitional artifact rather than, on its face, a lie.

The objection from some of the wounded is that the definition produces a misleading public picture. The New Republic reported accounts from service members who say injuries including concussion, vision and hearing loss and lung damage were logged as not serious.

Both propositions can hold. The category can be technically correct and the resulting public number can still understate what has happened to people.

Why it matters now

The United States is nine days into a resumed air campaign after a cease-fire collapsed, with American positions in Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf under periodic attack. Congress is being asked to fund and authorize a widening conflict.

The count of who has been hurt is the most basic input into that argument. When it is released incompletely, every subsequent debate about whether the war is going well proceeds on numbers that nobody quite trusts.