The Trump administration faces increasing pressure to explain why wounded US soldiers went more than a week without adequate hospital care after a March 1 drone strike in Kuwait, occurring shortly after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

A single Iranian drone bypassed air defenses and struck the relocated operations center of the US Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command at the port of Shuaiba, south of Kuwait City. The attack killed six reservists from Des Moines, Iowa, and wounded dozens more, marking the first US combat deaths of Operation Epic Fury, the war initiated by Donald Trump alongside Israel against Iran on February 28.

According to a letter sent on July 30 by congressional Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pat Ryan to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the unit had requested additional medical staff and supplies before the strike but was denied. Reports cited in the letter from the Washington Post and CBS News indicate there was no doctor on site after the attack, no fixed aid station, and only one ambulance available. Some wounded soldiers reportedly drove themselves to a hospital in Kuwait City.

The letter states, “Doctors told them that because they hadn’t been recorded as medical evacuees on the flight’s manifest or as seriously injured in [the defense department’s] casualty-processing database, they could only get limited treatment and had to wait in nearby barracks because the hospital was unable to admit them.”

Soldiers later sent to Fort Hood, Texas, reportedly went weeks without seeing a doctor capable of diagnosing traumatic brain injury despite failing post-blast cognitive tests multiple times. Families have told CBS News that the US Army downplayed the severity of individual wounds.

The Pentagon attributed some issues to a data problem. However, lawmakers reference reports that officials privately admitted dropping four service members—three killed in Jordan and one in northern Iraq in mid-July—from casualty counts because their deaths occurred after Trump’s declared ceasefire in April, despite strikes on Iran having resumed as of early July.

Additionally, on July 24, Senator Tim Kaine demanded answers by August 14 regarding the pre-selected target lists used in the war’s opening strikes, following a February 28 attack on a school in Minab, Iran, which killed over 150 civilians, most of them children.

Democrats have urged the Pentagon to respond to their 23 questions about the strike and casualty handling by August 12.

Sources