The Pentagon says “Operation Epic Fury” ended months ago. So why were troops still calling it that

An Air Force email from August, obtained by CBS News, showed the Pentagon instructing personnel to stop referring to ongoing U.S. military operations in Iran as “Operation Epic Fury,” three months after the Trump administration had already declared it over. Per CBS, the email surfaced a question nobody in the administration had clearly answered before: when exactly did this operation actually end?

In response to questions, the Pentagon said Wednesday that Operation Epic Fury officially concluded on May 5, the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the White House, “The operation is over. Epic Fury is, the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom.” Four days before that, Trump had told Congress the “hostilities” had “terminated.”

Before this, the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command had declined to give a formal end date for months, even as reporters kept asking. The U.S. and Iran have continued exchanging fire on and off since that May 5 date, including through a ceasefire that began in early April, which makes the timing of the new guidance even harder to square with the Pentagon’s own account of events.

Somebody apparently forgot to tell the people still using the name

Last month, as senior Air Force leaders traveled to Orlando for the 2026 Air Force Sergeants Association conference, public affairs officers were instructed to tell military leaders to stop saying “Operation Epic Fury” altogether. They were told to use broader language instead, referring to “overseas operations in the U.S. Central Command Area of Responsibility,” according to an email dated August 7.

That guidance came from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s central public affairs office, led by chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, and it reiterated that CENTCOM had to approve anything publicly released about the Iran conflict going forward. Multiple military officials, speaking anonymously because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly, said that the instruction wasn’t limited to the Air Force and had been spread across the entire Defense Department through August and September.

In July, the Pentagon’s casualty website originally listed four service members killed that month as killed in action during Operation Epic Fury. This was two months after the Pentagon now says that operation had already ended.

Three of them, 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, Staff Sgt. Angel Rampersad, and Pfc. Isabella Gonzales, died when an Iranian missile struck their barracks at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a strike that came as the White House drew scrutiny over transparency about Iran war casualties. The fourth, Staff Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, died a day later in Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian attack drone.

The Pentagon’s own casualty system still lists five troops wounded in June and one killed in July under Operation Epic Fury, with no end date attached to any of it. This is an inconsistency that lines up uncomfortably with Hegseth quietly extending U.S. troop deployments tied to the Iran conflict well into 2027 despite insisting for months that the mission was fast and decisive.