My 2018 article, “Grieving, Valuing, and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror’s American Toll,” demonstrates how the US has historically managed the visibility of its war dead. Focusing on Vietnam to Global War on Terror (GWoT) era policy and practice including the “Dover Ban,” my research illustrates how consecutive US Administrations (on both sides of the aisle) worked to move dead and suffering soldiers out of public view, not because they were unimportant, but because they were politically sensitive due to threatening a biopolitical facade of care and protection and ultimately threatening the ability for America to wage long-term wars.

This is the key insight: Visibility is not accidental — it is governed.

What we are seeing today is not just the undercounting of casualties — it is the continuation of what I have identified as a broader system of necropolitical statecraft that regulates how death is seen, counted and felt.

My research also highlights that the politics of counting is inseparable from the politics of valuing. The issue is not only whether deaths are recorded, but how they are framed, delayed, categorized or excluded altogether. Moreover, as author Thomas Gregory has recently pointed out in the case of civilian casualties produced by American wars, counting becomes a technique of governance: It shapes public perception, moderates dissent and ultimately enables the continuation of war.

Importantly, attention to grievability also reminds us that these processes are never uncontested. Even in the face of state efforts to suppress visibility, alternative forms of counting, witnessing and memorialization emerge. Families, journalists and researchers continue to demand recognition — to insist that these lives are not reducible to managed figures or bureaucratic categories.

That tension is still present now, as the search for the missing airman continues.

So rather than asking whether the US military is hiding casualties, a more productive question is this: What kinds of deaths are allowed to appear, and under what conditions?

Until we confront that question, debates about transparency will remain superficial. Because the issue is not simply that the numbers are wrong. It is that numbers themselves are part of the machinery through which war is made acceptable.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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