I am not talking about D-Day here. Any thing from say, the recent battle resulting in up to 70 Taliban deaths to small engagements where, God forbid, one or two American soldiers are killed?
All the way to the CinC in some form or another. Each step up the chain gets more and more general. At the unit level, the report will be very detailed, down to number of rounds expended, damage to equipment, “Pvt. Fred Smith sustained a penetrating wound to his upper thigh from an IED, evacuated, not life-threatening (Purple Heart to be issued)”, etc. At the Division level, it will be lumped together with all the other reports of unit activity for the day and become part of a bigger report. By the time it gets to the Pentagon and above, it’s just numbers. The President in his morning briefing will get numbers, not names and faces and places unless they are strategically significant. Fred will be just a data point unless his mother is the senior senator from Rhode Island or a major campaign contributor.
Nailed in one. One of the big problems Eisenhower had in the early stages of WWII in Africa/Italy was that he was inundated with field reports. Some very important and timely dispatches went unread until too much time had passed, resulting in unnecessary deaths on the front.
In WW2, even Admiral Nimitz reviewed select submarine patrol reports. Was he required to? Probably not. But in some ways it’s good for morale to believe that that particular ship’s actions are important to high command, and receiving recognition from the theatre commander for a job well done is a boost as well.
COMSUBPAC (Withers, English, Lockwood) read most, if not all, of the patrol reports, and “critiqued” the skippers performance, which affected promotions (or transfers out of the sub service).