The Pentagon is taking a “shameful approach” to releasing information about US casualties in the Iran war, Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, has told the Guardian.

The defence department has not held a press briefing for two-and-a-half months. Officials have faced accusations that they are engaged in a cover-up designed to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, fearing a public backlash before November’s midterm elections.

Panetta, who held weekly Pentagon briefings during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticised the department for failing to disclose how many people had been hurt in bomb attacks by Iran on US bases.

“There’s a deliberate effort here to basically withhold information from the American people, and I think it represents in many ways a shameful approach to sharing the responsibility that we all have when it comes to fighting a war,” he said by phone.

A fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran collapsed earlier this month and both sides have been carrying out daily strikes against each other, prompting fears of a quagmire and a betrayal of Trump’s campaign promise to eschew “forever wars”.

The number of US troops killed in the war on Iran rose to 18 last weekend, while roughly 430 US troops have been injured. The Pentagon said on Monday that 100 service members had been injured since 7 July but that 96% had returned to duty. The department initially failed to disclose the figures, according to a New York Times newspaper report, only belatedly acknowledging the casualties in a social media post.

Officials dismissed the Times’ article as “baseless and malicious” and contend that they are not strictly required to publicise injuries if service members are expected to return to duty. But questions intensified when another Times report said the Pentagon’s website had lowered the number of troop deaths from 18 to 14; Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, blamed “a temporary data disruption”.

Critics, however, say the information blackout is a calculated political strategy to hide a failing military intervention.

Ned Price, a former deputy to the US representative to the United Nations and former spokesperson for the state department, said: “This goes beyond a run-of-the-mill administration distrust toward and hostility against the press. This is more about shielding the American people from the true and total cost of this war.”

The Pentagon v the press

Since the war started five months ago, there has been a tension between the government’s desire for operational secrecy and the media’s demand for transparency on behalf of the public. Even during contentious, unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the lines of communication were kept more or less open. But since Trump’s return to power in January 2025, the Pentagon – restyled as the Department of War – has been restricting access.

Almost immediately, it ousted major outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR) and Politico from their long-held desks, supplanting them with Trump-friendly media such as Breitbart, the One America News Network and the New York Post. In May, it imposed restrictions on the free movement of reporters in most of the Pentagon building.

In October, most news outlets turned in their access badges and walked out of the Pentagon rather than agree to new rules that would leave them vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information – classified or otherwise – that had not been approved by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, for release. In December, the department held a three-day event to usher in newly accredited media organisations, including pro-Trump podcasters and influencers.

In March this year, the Pentagon introduced a rule that required journalists to be escorted on Pentagon grounds by authorised department personnel. In June, it said its press office was now a classified space inaccessible to journalists because it was used by speechwriters who “routinely handle classified material”. The ever-tightening limits have alarmed press freedom watchdogs.

Clayton Weimers, the Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, said: “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this Pentagon has been more hostile to the news media than any other Pentagon in recent memory.”

Mark Schoeff, president of the National Press Club, agrees that such hostility is a historical aberration, saying: “What is happening at the Pentagon is unique in my 34 years in Washington. We’ve not seen these kinds of restrictions on the media at the Pentagon. Even during Desert Storm [the Gulf war] and the war in Afghanistan, I can’t recall a time when the Pentagon tried to shut down press access like this.”

The current obfuscation is particularly jarring when contrasted with the administration’s earlier posture: in the opening days of the Iran war, Hegseth was a ubiquitous presence, delivering bombastic briefings in which he crowed about annihilating the Iranian military with “no mercy” and restoring the US as a nation of “real warriors”.

The Pentagon then banned photojournalists when images of Hegseth deemed “unflattering” appeared in the public domain. At one briefing, Hegseth compared reporters to the “Pharisees”, describing the media’s coverage of the war in Iran as an “endless stream of garbage”.

Now, the bravado has been replaced by a vacuum. While there have been no briefings since May, Hegseth last week announced a screening programme for “testosterone deficiency” among troops, calling it necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best”. Such diversions raised suspicions that the war was spiralling out of control.

Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, said: “When you’re not able to communicate clearly what’s actually taking place on the ground, that means you’re likely not confident or comfortable with what is happening on the ground and how it will play politically and in the policy world here. It’s a pretty obvious thing that there’s a lot of concern about there being casualties in this war right now.”

The cost of war

The war in Iran is already unpopular in the US due to rising gas prices and other inflationary impacts on people’s everyday lives. People who are paying attention know that 18 US service members have died, Price said. “But what they don’t know,” he added, “unless they’re really digging, is the full extent of casualties that our men and women in uniform have suffered as a result of this decision to take our country to war without clear objectives and certainly without a clear off-ramp.

“This is not the sort of thing where a dozen or two dozen service members have suffered low-grade concussion. There are hundreds – by one count, some 500 US service members – who have suffered physically as a result of this war, and the administration probably rightly calculates that, if the economic costs were compounded with the full toll that this is taking on our service members, this war, which is already a politically losing proposition, would drag the administration down even further.”

For veterans and national security experts, the Pentagon’s handling of US casualties amounts to a shameful cover-up. “The Pentagon said 96% of those affected returned to duty but again, a reminder that we know that modern warfare, like the impacts of an injury, might not be felt or seen until months or years later,” said Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a non-profit advocacy organisation. “We deserve to know exactly what’s happened and it raises questions about why they wouldn’t be reporting these casualties in a timely manner. My assumption is that it’s about controlling the political narrative before a major national election.”

Although Hegseth has avoided the media, he was obliged to attend a hearing on Capitol Hill this week to defend a war that has already cost the US $37.5bn. During a combative Senate appropriations committee hearing on Tuesday, politicians from both sides of the aisle expressed deep frustration with the administration’s endless demands for money coupled with its refusal to provide straight answers or a coherent strategy.

When the senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, called the administration’s approach a complete “failure”, Hegseth erupted in anger, snapping: “Shame on you and others who call this a quagmire and a failure.” Peters shot back: “You, sir, are the failure. You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.”

Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer and executive director of the Steady State – an advocacy group of more than 400 former national security officials – warns that the Trump administration and its Pentagon leadership do not view the public or the press as stakeholders to be informed, but as adversaries to be defeated.

“Pete Hegseth and the president of the United States don’t see a real major role for the voters of America or the Congress, so why tell them anything? They’ve made it clear that they don’t see a role for you, the media. You are an enemy,” he said.

The Pentagon denies that it is minimising reports of casualties. Sean Parnell, the chief spokesperson, said in a statement: “The Department of War and US Central Command has consistently provided comprehensive, real-time updates to the world on the United States’ strikes and operations in Iran.

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have been constantly providing updates directly to the media and the American people online, delivering clear, unfiltered insight into our objectives and decisive actions.”

Although briefings have dried up, the news has not, as Pentagon beat reporters continue to work their sources and pursue information. Panetta said officials were “trying to tiptoe past the graveyard, so to speak, in the sense that they’re hoping that the less they say, the less controversy they’ll be involved in, but the reality is that the press will only operate that much more aggressively to find out exactly what’s going on.

“In essence what they’re doing is challenging the press to find what’s really happening, and they will. They can dodge, bob and weave, they can hide it but my experience is that no matter how much you try to hide it, in the end, the truth comes out.”