Pentagon quietly shut legally required program to prevent civilian deaths by military, watchdog finds

Summary

The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog. A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE). Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of making deep cuts to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war. While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnelhad been lost or reassigned. “As a result, the DoW may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy,” the report read. “A policy required by federal law.” The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment. The program was created by Lloyd Austin, then defense secretary, in January 2022, under Joe Biden, following years of deadly US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Airwars, a civilian harm monitor, estimated that US drone and airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – in the 20 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief, has recently come under fire over deadly attacks on Iran, including a US strike in Minab that killed at least 175 people, a majority of them children, at an all-girls school. Limiting casualties has not been a top priority under Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War, rebranded on his watch from Department of Defense last September. When pressed on civilian casualties in Iran, he has pivoted to blame the country’s regime for placing rocket launchers in civilian areas, and also claimed no nation in history had taken more precautions than the US to avoid civilian deaths. The inspector general’s report, and people familiar with the office, tell a different story. “My assessment is that they’ve left a semblance of the department because Hegseth was taking heat for illegal operations,” said Wes J Bryant, an air force combat veteran who was the chief of civilian harm assessments on the CP CoE program. He described a stream of forced resignations and halted investigations since Hegseth assumed his post, saying there are only seven people left reporting to the program, and that they are “locked out of all operations” and have been relegated to “a closet office” in Virginia. Bryant was forced out of his job last spring, as the Trump administration removed safeguards that once restrained US forces from authorizing the use of lethal force, according to a ProPublica report. The inspector general’s report, published on 13 May, points to an inflection point in February, when two senior officials – the acting under secretary of war for policy, Elbridge Colby, and the secretary of the army, Dan Driscoll – separately proposed to Hegseth the program be cut or eliminated. One proposal went further, according to the report, and recommended scrapping its action plan and its underpinning departmental instruction entirely. Then, without waiting for a response, the military began acting as if the cuts had already been approved. Later that month, the US launched strikes on Iran. Responding to a draft report in December, Colby argued in a letter that the Pentagon was in compliance with federal law, claiming that its leadership “already collaborates with the CP CoE and provides components with sample materials related to lessons learned from previous civilian casualty and harm events, including examples of strike cell tactics, techniques, procedures, and cognitive bias mitigation training”. Colby said the department would deliver on its training goals by the end of next year. Her letter described a review of CP CoE was “underway”, and claimed the unit continued to operate with “dedicated full-time staff”. The CHMR steering committee – a senior body chaired by Colby, and Christopher Mahoney, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, tooversee the entire program – held its last meeting in December, according to the report. One combatant command official told the inspector general that their command had “largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025”, weeks after the proposals surfaced. Another told the IG they “did not want to spend resources on actions or making future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed”. The report found that the steering committee did not assign clear offices of primary responsibility to each of the programs 133 actions until that December, which was the final year of a four-year plan. Its implementation tracking tool contained data a senior official acknowledged was “incomplete and inaccurate”. The most deadly US strike on Iran since the US and Israel launched the war, on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary school in Minab, occurred on 28 February – around the same time as the inspector general found that CHMR’s operations had ground to a halt. The inspector general gave the Pentagon until 12 June to provide the office with a plan. Madison Hunke, US program manager at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said: “We are seeing devastating levels of civilian harm in Iran since February. If that’s any indication of the Department’s current approach to civilian harm after gutting 90% of it’s CHMR workforce, it’s hard to imagine what future US operations might look like if these programs are further degraded.”