Pentagon Killed Civilian Protection Program, Leading to Killing Civilians
Lethality.
ProPublica (“The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.“):
Just over a year ago, [former Air Force special operations targeting specialist Wes J. Bryant] had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
[…]
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
It has been a very long time since the United States fought a peer competitor. In recent decades, as we have invested in exquisite technologies, the combination of near-absolute air supremacy and ever-more-precise weapons and targeting capability have given us the ability to minimize noncombatant casualties to an extent unimaginable not all that long ago.
The nature of most of our post-Cold War operations has been such that doing so was imperative, not only from a moral perspective but because the mission demanded it.
[C]ivilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
As the strategic environment has shifted in recent years to deterring and preparing for conflict if necessary with China, I have cautioned my students that the rules of engagement they have become used to would shift. Against a peer competitor, we would out of necessity prioritize precision less and lethality more. In a World War III scenario, “winning hearts and minds” would not be a top priority.
OPERATION EPIC FURY is not WWIII.
While the desired end state is, to say the least, murky (to say nothing of whether the US and Israeli war aims are in synch) any reasonable one requires building a follow-on Iranian state more favorable to US interests than the Islamic Republic. To the extent President Trump wants the Iranian people to rally against the regime and to us, avoiding indiscriminately killing their children is a rather minimal precondition.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
I don’t think the counterinsurgency or counterterrorism lenses are particularly useful here. We’re trying to topple a regime from the air, hoping that the Iranian people themselves will rise up to serve as the ground force. While I’m exceedingly skeptical that will happen, there’s no reason to think a large insurgency is going to spring up.
But this was very much a war of choice. There was zero reason to believe Iran was going to attack the United States or its forces. The so-called 12 Day War had left them weakened.
While they remained (and remain even after days of massive bombardment) a formidable middle power, armed with a fearsome number of armed drones and missiles, their air defenses were incredibly weak and are now all but destroyed. There was simply no operational reason to abandon safeguards for noncombatants and every strategic reason not to.
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
Caine and Colby are seasoned defense professionals accustomed to looking at the operational and strategic picture. Hegseth’s experience is at the low tactical level, and he became increasingly embittered by the ROE that he came to believe hampered our efforts—and got fellow soldiers killed—in Iraq and Afghanistan. That those ROE were necessary for mission accomplishment can be hard to swallow when you’re at the tip of the spear.
There’s a whole lot more to the report, which I commend to you.
There were also no strategic reasons for starting this war in the first place, which is even worse. What did you expect?
This pretty much says it all:
Apparently, we’re waging war to satisfy the “warriors,” rather than using the military to achieve realistic political goals.
It’s like putting a middle manager who is too stupid to conceive of anything beyond his immediate experience (and with a drinking problem to boot) in charge of a large and rather complex organization.
Thank you very much, GOP senators!
Whimsy is a better word choice, here. Very much a war of whimsy.
Fixed it.
What does surprise me is there was no plan to keep oil tankers safe through the straits of Hormuz.
@Kathy: Somehow I don’t think you’re really surprised.
On the topic of the post: The point to limiting civilian casualties and other rules of engagement is to prevent actions that undermine the strategic goals of the operation. Hegseth may be right to eliminate them as this Iran exercise seems to have no strategic goals.
Minimizing civilian casualties is what a decent, ethical, and thoughtful military leadership would always do, unless the overall goal was to completely destroy the target country and engender the enmity of the rest of the civilized world. Trotting out trash talking buffoons like Trump and Hegseth suggests the latter is the US position. We know Trump’s narcissism prevents him from considering the plight of others, but what’s Hegseth’s excuse?
@Charley in Cleveland: “We know Trump’s narcissism prevents him from considering the plight of others, but what’s Hegseth’s excuse?” Answer: Narcissism.
@Charley in Cleveland: Hegseth matches the behavior of someone who experienced abuse of some form as a child. What little I have seen of his bio doesn’t particularly support this, though. Yeah, maybe narcissism, maybe something else.
Honestly, the phrase he used about “stupid rules of engagement” was such a red flag. I mean, yeah, he was tip of the spear, and those ROE cost him. But to get there, there needed to be a pre-existing vulnerability, it seems to me.
@gVOR10:
Not at the level of incompetence. But I am surprised there wasn’t even a poorly conceived, incompetently implemented plan from the start. After all, high gas prices are poison at the polls for the ruling party.
Breaking:
According to the NYT the official inquiry has shown Fatso and the Fox Host did in fact kill the 175 kids, in their little war of whimsy, and then lied to the American people. Just like they lied about the US citizens killed in Minn.
These people are abjectly incompetent.
Maybe the Israelis have some strategic goals. Has anyone asked them?
The Israelis have to know that there will eventually be a Democratic administration, and that a war for no good reason (for the US) now will greatly limit American support then, when they might actually need it. I would expect they would weigh this cost against the benefits and it would have required some goal.
But I’ve skimmed some Israeli newspapers, and I don’t see anything.
Is it just “mowing the lawn” further afield with American help? An expectation that they’ve already screwed up their relationship with America so badly that they’re on their own in a few years and are just striking now because why not?
@Daryl:
“According to the NYT the official inquiry has shown Fatso and the Fox Host did in fact kill the 175 kids, in their little war of whimsy, and then lied to the American people. Just like they lied about the US citizens killed in Minn.”
Unfortunately, our political and media systems are not set up for there to be any penalty for brazenly lying like this. In an ideal world, any time a person who lies so blatantly answers questions (such as at a news conference or on a Sunday morning talk show), one of the first questions should be to remind everyone of the prior lies and ask the person why the public should believe that he or she is telling the truth now.
@Daryl:
As an incompetent person, I take offense!
Ok, but seriously, I think blowing up the school and killing over a hundred children was less incompetence than simply not giving a fuck about collateral damage or even wanting more. This is “maximum lethality” doing exactly what it is designed to do — raise the price of defying the US’s whims.
Will other brutal authoritarian regimes think twice about defying the manly men in the US knowing that we will kill their children? I doubt it, but I think the manly men in the Trump administration earnestly believe that it will (because they are morons).
@Daryl:
The self-evident assumption from the start was that wither the US or Israel were responsible, because no one else was dropping bombs all over Iran.
When video revealed a Tomahawk, the question was resolved beyond doubt.
El Taco’s attempts to pin the atrocity on Iran is disingenuous in the extreme, and should work perfectly on his deplorables.
On breaking not-exactly-news, El Taco is no claiming Iran was about to take over the whole Middle East.
I don’t really need to explain why no such thing is even remotely possible, do I?
@Moosebreath:
Who cares about lying. They are murdering people!!!
@Gustopher:
The incompetence lies in relying on AI and not verifying before striking. Over 5,000 targets to date? This idiots are not asking important questions before shooting.
@Kathy:
It’s Fatso’s war of whimsy. HE IS RESPONSIBLE!!!
There are a few reasons this happened. Your analysis about Hegseth is pretty accurate I think. On top of that since he is really a TV personality playing a role, he has decided his role is to act like a tough guy. Tough guys dont worry about collateral damage they kill everybody and let God sort them out. The other factor not being cited here is that this is very much an Israeli policy. The Israelis accept high levels of civilian casualties to try to achieve their goals. Yes, they advertise that they try to avoid civilian casualties and they publicize those attempts but the actual numbers show that they accept high rates of civilian deaths.
Is the photo at the head of this article approved? https://people.com/unflattering-pete-hegseth-photos-barred-press-photographers-report-1192404
I understand his pain. I’m also much better looking than my photos.
I don’t think he was “feigning.”
@steve222:
It was most likely a simple targeting error. That school was adjacent to a base and had about the same lay-out as the buildings next door. This is precisely the sort of situation the program Hegseth ended was addressing. Careful, thorough vetting of intel is required, but that slows the killing down, doesn’t it?
Reminds of what war does to most people. “All Quiet On The Western Front” is about as much documentary as book/movie. There’s a lot written on how enough combat will make about 98% of people as psychotic as the lead character of that story got within about 6 months, and the 2% that aren’t changed were psychopaths going in.
Hegseth strikes me as a 2%er. He loves killing people so much he doesn’t even want to conceal it.
@Gustopher:
I think that’s pretty astute speculation. It’s mowing the lawn right down to the dirt in the expectation that you may be getting a tougher HOA board later.
@dazedandconfused:
My father did two tours in Vietnam and was not a psychopath going in or coming out. Granted he was in a relatively easy gig, but he did, to his certain knowledge, shoot what may have been a Vietcong sapper – they were known to swim out to moored boats and plant mines or toss grenades in. Then again, petty thieves were also known to swim out and see what they could steal from the moored boats. I think had he at any point been a psychopath he’d have been rather less conflicted about taking a life on that that dark night long ago.
I’m not taking offense, really, but I have to stand up for the man I knew. Died of a non-Alzheimers dementia a few years ago.
@Michael Reynolds:
Being in a war zone is not the same thing as being in combat infantry. 10% tooth, 90% tail.
In his latest oral diarrhea fest, El Taco claimed the war on Iran is already won. In fact, “In the first hour it was over”.
So all the days of bombing since the first hour have all been to gratuitously expend munitions and kill Iranians?
Three ships were hit earlier today. Iraq has suspended halted operations on its oil port.
Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks for oil flow from the Persian Gulf to normalize. and that’s assuming Iran doesn’t keep targeting tankers just because they can.
@Kathy:
The troubling thing is that they can keep targeting ships pretty much indefinitely. And their allies the Houthis sit on the Bab el Mandab.
It’s important to understand the “escalation trap” as discussed by Robert Pape.
Trump is more analogous to LBJ’s loss of control of Vietnam.
Israel’s security is getting worse with the passage of time, not better.