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War Department submitted false Section 1057 report to Congress claiming zero civilian deaths from 2025 boat-strike campaign

The War Department delivered its mandatory Section 1057 annual civilian-casualty report to Congress on August 11, 2026, attributing zero civilian deaths to the Trump administration's 2025 campaign of lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific despite independent reporting documenting more than 120 deaths. The same report found U.S. strikes in Yemen's Operation Rough Rider killed 153 civilians in 2025, a figure two government officials called a "lowball" undercount of the Yemen Data Project's tally of at least 238 killed. Officials who reviewed the report internally described it to The Intercept as a "total whitewash."

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
Washington, D.C.

Abuses documented

Actors

On August 11, 2026, the War Department delivered its congressionally mandated Section 1057 annual civilian-casualty report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, attributing zero civilian deaths to the Trump administration's 2025 campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific. Independent reporting has documented more than 120 civilian deaths in that boat-strike campaign during 2025 alone, with the cumulative toll across 2025 and 2026 exceeding 220. Two government officials who reviewed the report told The Intercept the boat-strike finding had "absolutely no credibility" and that the broader report was a "total whitewash."

The same report found U.S. air and naval strikes in Yemen under Operation Rough Rider killed 153 civilians and wounded nearly 250 people in 2025, including 68 killed in an April 28 strike on an immigrant detention center that killed no combatants. One official called the Yemen figures "lowball numbers"; the independent Yemen Data Project has documented at least 238 civilians killed and 467 wounded in the same campaign. CBS News, which separately obtained the submitted report, confirmed the Yemen casualty figures and that the tally excluded any boat-strike deaths entirely.

Section 1057 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Pentagon to report civilian harm from U.S. military operations to Congress and the public annually. The false and incomplete accounting follows a documented pattern under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of dismantling the department's civilian-harm tracking capacity, including cutting the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence's staff from 40 to nine and abandoning its casualty-tracking database. A May 2026 Pentagon inspector general report found the resulting civilian-harm review process was "largely inactive."

Why we recorded this

Congress requires the Pentagon to publicly account for civilians killed in U.S. military operations so lawmakers and the public can assess and constrain the use of lethal force; falsifying that count defeats the law's purpose and shields an extrajudicial killing campaign from oversight. The War Department's Section 1057 report attributes zero deaths to a boat-strike campaign independent reporting shows killed more than 120 people in 2025, and undercounts confirmed Yemen strike deaths that two Pentagon officials themselves called a "lowball" figure and a "total whitewash." This archive records the falsified accounting as its own act -- a corruption of the official record distinct from the killings it conceals.

Sources

  1. “Total Whitewash”: New Pentagon Report Claims U.S. Killed No Civilians in Boat Strikes — The Intercept investigative accessed August 12, 2026
  2. U.S. military operations killed 153 civilians last year, Pentagon says — CBS News investigative accessed August 12, 2026

See also