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In its first year under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon dramatically slashed its teams responsible for taking efforts to reduce civilian harm in military conflicts, new reporting finds — an undertaking that continued until as little as months before the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Minab, Iran, in one of the worst single incidents of a civilian massacre committed by the U.S. in modern history.
A report on the cuts to civilian harm reduction staff, reported by The Intercept, finds that, between January 2025 and the end of the year, the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was slashed from 40 to just nine. In that time, the Pentagon also stopped developing a database that would have helped track incidents where civilians were harmed by U.S. actions.
These slashes to civilian harm mitigation and response, abbreviated as CMHR, were done across the Department of Defense.
For instance, such staff at Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military activity in the Middle East, were cut from 10 to one. When U.K. watchdog group Airwars tried to submit documentation of civilian casualties to Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has directed the U.S.’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the group was told that the command did not have the infrastructure to deal with such reports.
When it comes to the Minab massacre, in which the U.S. killed over 150 people with a Tomahawk missile, including over 100 children, those left at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence aren’t even allowed to investigate the incident, as well as other major incidents with civilian casualties, the report says.
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Wes Bryant, who formerly oversaw the center’s civilian harm assessments, told The Intercept that the remaining staff have only been retained so that the department can keep up appearances, and that their findings are “being thrown into the wind.”
The reporting follows others that have found that the Trump administration sought to shutter the office before Donald Trump was even inaugurated in January 2025. Since then, Hegseth has made his vow to ignore what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” a central tenet of his identity as the military’s top official — and numerous scandals regarding civilian harm done by the U.S. have followed, including in the boat strike campaign, strikes on Yemen, and in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is trying to replace some of the duties of its civilian harm mitigation staff with AI, The Intercept notes. Military service members are instead using AI systems like Palantir’s Maven Smart System, as well as the military’s AskSage, to conduct assessments of the civilian environment.
This lines up with reports that service members used AI to help select the elementary school in Minab as a target, and bypassed warnings about faulty targeting in order to expedite strikes at the beginning of the war.
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