Pentagon Cut Its Legally Required Program for Reducing Civilian Deaths in Combat, Inspector General Finds

Details

On May 13, 2026, the Department of War's Office of Inspector General released a report concluding that the U.S. military no longer has the people, tools, or infrastructure to comply with two federal laws governing how it prevents and investigates the deaths of civilians in its combat operations abroad. The finding concerns what the military calls "civilian harm"—noncombatants killed or wounded by U.S. forces in overseas wars, distinct from anything handled by domestic police or courts. The watchdog found that the Pentagon implemented none of the objectives in its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan by the end of fiscal year 2025, and that "as a result, the [department] may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy ... a policy required by Federal law."

The report landed at a charged moment. The Pentagon had just spent three months at war with Iran, during which a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck a girls' elementary school in Minab, killing at least 165 people—most of them children, with Iranian officials putting the toll as high as 175—precisely the kind of targeting failure the program was designed to prevent. The same week the report was published, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee accused Army leadership of breaking the law, and the top U.S. commander in the Iran war told Congress his command had no way to corroborate public reports of strikes on Iranian hospitals and schools. By July, the congressional investigation the report helped fuel had produced formal findings: a letter from ten Democratic lawmakers charging that Hegseth's Pentagon had "defunded and impeded" civilian protection efforts, potentially in violation of federal law.

What "Civilian Harm" Means, and Why a Program Exists

For nearly two decades, U.S. counterterrorism strikes killed large numbers of people who were never combatants. The monitoring group Airwars estimated that U.S. operations killed more than 20,000 civilians—and perhaps as many as 48,000—in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in the years after 2001, an average well above a thousand a year. A series of New York Times investigations then documented not only botched airstrikes but a pattern of the military systematically undercounting the dead, rarely investigating, and almost never holding anyone accountable. Those revelations prompted Congress, beginning in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, to require the Defense Department to develop a formal policy for reducing and responding to civilian harm.

The result, released in August 2022 under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) Action Plan—an unusually ambitious set of reforms sequencing more than 130 specific actions across roughly a dozen objectives over four years. The plan stationed civilian-harm specialists at the combatant commands, the regional headquarters that run U.S. operations in each part of the world. It created civilian-environment teams to map where civilians lived and worked before a strike, red-teaming functions to challenge targeting assumptions, and civilian-harm assessment cells to receive and investigate allegations that U.S. forces had killed noncombatants. At the center of the architecture sat the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which trained troops in these methods and held the institutional expertise. By the end of 2024, according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), the department had hired more than 160 people for these roles, many of them well-integrated into the targeting cycle.

Two pieces of that architecture were written directly into statute—the Center of Excellence under 10 U.S.C. § 184 and the underlying civilian-harm policy under 10 U.S.C. § 134. The distinction matters, because it means the executive branch cannot lawfully eliminate either without an act of Congress.

What the Inspector General Found

The inspector general's office opened the evaluation on its own initiative at the end of 2024, before the second Trump administration took office. When the team began, it assessed that the department was on track to meet the objectives due by September 2025; by mid-2025 it had downgraded most of them from "on track" to "at risk," and it ultimately concluded that the department had fully implemented none.

The report traces the reversal to February 2025, when Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll separately proposed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the program be cut or eliminated, with one proposal recommending that the action plan and its underlying instruction be rescinded entirely. Hegseth never formally announced a decision, but the military began acting as though the cuts had already been approved: the department ended funding for the program's data-management platform, the steering committee that oversaw the effort stopped meeting, and the combatant commands reduced their dedicated staff. The commands were candid about why. One told the inspector general it had "largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025," and another said it "did not want to spend resources on actions or making future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed."

In May 2025, the department went a step further and asked Congress to repeal the law requiring the Center of Excellence. Congress declined to act on the request. Because both statutes remain in force, the inspector general emphasized that the legal obligation persists regardless of internal decisions—and that the department was not meeting it.

The report did not lay all of the blame on the current administration. Some failures predated it: the military had struggled to hire quickly enough, interdependent tasks had slipped, and the steering committee tracked progress poorly, not assigning offices of primary responsibility for the plan's 133 actions until December 2024, the final year of the four-year schedule. Its tracking tool, a senior official conceded, held data that was "incomplete and inaccurate." The watchdog also noted that officials had denied its team access to observe steering committee meetings and blocked access to the implementation tracker—obstruction that ProPublica later reported extended to withholding access to the department's civilian-harm tracking tools, and that congressional investigators would single out in July.

The Scale of the Reductions

A New York Times investigation and subsequent ProPublica reporting found that civilian-harm staff across the combatant commands had been cut by more than 90 percent, leaving roughly a tenth of the original capacity in place. Several commands lost their teams entirely; others retained a single person. Central Command, responsible for the Middle East and therefore for the thousands of strikes in Iran, went from a team of about ten to one. The civilian-harm office at Joint Special Operations Command was eliminated outright, and specialists were removed from target-development strike teams. The Center of Excellence, once staffed by nearly 40 people, was down to seven.

Wes J. Bryant, an Air Force combat veteran who served as chief of civilian-harm assessments at the Center of Excellence until he was forced out in 2025, told the Guardian that the remaining staff are "locked out of all operations" and have been relegated to "a closet office" in Virginia. He described a stream of forced resignations and halted investigations, and assessed that leadership had "left a semblance of the department because Hegseth was taking heat for illegal operations." He was blunter still with The Intercept, calling the inspector general's report itself a "whitewash" that understated the damage; what remained of the Center after March 2025, he said, was "a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority."

The budget figures track the staffing changes. The Pentagon reduced CHMR funding in its FY2026 request, and Congress appropriated $11.6 million anyway—labeled "conflict operations analysis"—to preserve what it could, though that was well short of the $72.8 million the department itself had estimated in a 2024 manpower assessment was needed to carry out the plan. According to CIVIC, the FY2027 request appears to zero out dedicated CHMR funding entirely.

The Connection to Iran

The clearest test of the reductions came at Central Command. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) asked CENTCOM commander Admiral Bradley Cooper whether his command had examined public reports of roughly 40 strikes on hospitals and schools in Iran. Cooper acknowledged that it had not, despite department policy requiring such assessments. Five days later, testifying to the House committee, he said he had spent the intervening weekend conducting them and had concluded that only the Minab school strike correlated with a U.S. strike and U.S. munitions—a conclusion that conflicts both with independent civilian-harm reporting and, as CIVIC notes, with the department's own assessment procedures.

CIVIC argues that the staffing reductions and the targeting failures are connected. Without civilian-environment teams, the group wrote, "targeting decisions are more likely to rely on incomplete or outdated data," which is exactly what a preliminary Pentagon investigation found at Minab, where Central Command generated target coordinates from outdated intelligence and struck a building that had been walled off and marked as a school years earlier. The loss of red-teaming removed an internal check against confirmation bias, and the elimination of the assessment cells broke the feedback loop that turns mistakes into corrected practice. The inspector general also noted that the military had stopped funding the database used to track civilian harm—the same tool that could have supported the verification Cooper said his command was unable to perform.

The Minab investigation itself remains open. Hegseth promised in March 2026 that "the command investigation will take as long as necessary to address all the matters surrounding this incident," and Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) and 120 House members demanded answers about the strike. As of ProPublica's July reporting, no final findings had been released.

The Pentagon's Defense

The department disputes the characterization that it is shutting the program down. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department had received the report and was reviewing the program "to ensure optimal alignment with evolving mission needs and resource availability," adding that "final decisions regarding the [CHMR] enterprise are pending" and that the department "remains committed to minimizing civilian harm caused by military operations and to meeting all relevant statutory requirements."

Army Secretary Driscoll made a similar argument at the House hearing, acknowledging the department's legal obligations but contending that much of the disruption the inspector general documented stemmed from organizational restructuring rather than an intentional effort to end the program. In his written response to the draft report, Under Secretary Colby went further, asserting that the department was already in compliance: it had designated a senior official responsible for CHMR, he wrote, and the Center of Excellence continued to operate with full-time staff. He argued that the policy and the Center needed to "reflect current leadership's priorities and direction," and that reviews of both were underway.

The inspector general rejected those arguments on the merits. Designating an official does not satisfy 10 U.S.C. § 134, the report explained, because the statute also requires that official to "develop, coordinate, and oversee compliance with" the civilian-harm policy; and 10 U.S.C. § 184 does not merely require that the Center be staffed but assigns it specific tasks the watchdog found it was no longer performing. The inspector general gave the department until June 12 to provide a concrete plan to return to compliance. According to early reporting, Colby and the Joint Staff director responded that they "partially agreed" with the recommendations but offered no steps the inspector general found satisfactory.

There is also a substantive policy case behind the reductions, made most forcefully by the administration's defenders, that the program had become a bureaucratic drag on combat effectiveness. Hegseth has publicly disparaged what he calls "stupid rules of engagement" and framed the cuts as part of his "lethality" agenda, telling troops, in remarks quoted by ProPublica, "We became 'the woke department.' ... We're done with that shit." Some conservative commentators have similarly framed the CHMR enterprise as a self-imposed handicap that breeds hesitation on the battlefield. In that view, lethality and victory, not compliance machinery, should be the priority.

The Counterargument From Inside the Military

That case is contested from inside the uniformed military and from veterans, not only by human-rights advocates. The reductions were made over the objections of senior military officials, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and veterans' organizations urged Hegseth to preserve the programs. The inspector general's report itself cites military officials warning that reduced CHMR resourcing not only raises the risk of civilian harm but endangers U.S. personnel, undermines mission success, and erodes readiness, battlespace awareness, and legitimacy.

The argument has bipartisan adherents. Representative Crow, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, told the House hearing that the military's long-term success depends on retaining the support of local populations—support that collapses when civilians are killed or maimed. "We ultimately lost the support of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, who we were there to serve," he said. The premise of the program, stated in the action plan itself, is that mitigating civilian harm is "critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield," a view that military leaders, including Trump appointees, have repeatedly affirmed.

Congressional and Outside Response

Scrutiny began before the report was released. Eleven senators led by Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) opened an investigation into Hegseth's role in weakening the programs, tying the cuts to the civilian toll in Iran and writing that the changes "contradict more than a decade of bipartisan consensus and DoD-led reforms, initiated during the first Trump administration."

After the report, the criticism sharpened. Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on House Armed Services, told Driscoll directly: "You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm." His closing remarks captured the committee's skepticism of the restructuring explanation: "I think a good number of members on this committee do not trust the Secretary of Defense on civilian harm. And we don't trust the notion that it's just being moved around. It seems like it's being gutted, and that there is no focus on it whatsoever." Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA), co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept that "this is a crisis of the Trump Administration's own making," and Amnesty International's Amanda Klasing said the cuts had already had "horrific consequences," calling on Congress to act "before the U.S. unlawfully kills or harms more civilians."

The July Findings Letter

The congressional investigation produced its first formal findings in early July. In a letter to Hegseth dated July 5, 2026, first reported by ProPublica on July 6, ten Democratic lawmakers led by Warren charged that the Trump administration—"potentially in violation of federal law—has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts" at the Pentagon. The signers included Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Representatives Crow and Smith; several are military veterans, lending the charge the same inside-the-institution weight as the earlier objections from serving officers. Drawing on the inspector general's report, the letter catalogued the roughly 90 percent staffing cuts, the defunding of the congressionally mandated Center of Excellence, and the department's withholding of civilian-harm tracking tools from the inspector general, and posed 20 questions to Hegseth with a response deadline of July 9, 2026. Whether the department met that deadline had not been publicly reported as of ProPublica's coverage.

The ProPublica report accompanying the letter also widened the lens beyond Iran, citing a surge in reported civilian casualties in Yemen and Somalia amid an increased strike tempo—an indication that the concerns raised by the Minab strike were not confined to a single theater.

What Is and Isn't Established

The reductions matter most because of when they happened. Even as the program's staff and funding were cut, the scope of U.S. military operations expanded sharply: since late 2025, U.S. forces have carried out lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed roughly 200 people, conducted operations in Venezuela and Somalia, and fought the war in Iran, where independent monitors estimate more than 1,600 civilians were killed—and, per ProPublica's July reporting, reported civilian casualties have surged in Yemen and Somalia as the strike tempo there has risen. The demand for the program rose as its capacity fell.

Within that picture, the documented consequences are specific rather than sweeping. The Minab strike has been tied by a preliminary Pentagon inquiry to the precise failure mode the cut teams existed to guard against, and CENTCOM's inability to keep up with reports of strikes on Iranian schools and hospitals is a concrete lapse in a function the program was built to perform. What cannot be established is a number. Neither the department nor outside monitors can say how many civilians would have lived had the program remained intact, because the counterfactual is unknowable. Attribution itself is contested: Airwars executive director Emily Tripp, whose group documented hundreds of civilian-harm incidents during the conflict, has said it is often difficult to determine whether the United States or Israel was responsible for a given strike, and has noted that at CENTCOM's reported pace—13,000 targets in just over a month, against roughly 800 a month at the height of the war on ISIS—"there's a certain inevitability about [civilian] harm given the scale." ProPublica's reporting captures the limit honestly: current and former officials say the program, had it continued, "almost certainly would've reduced the number of noncombatants harmed"—a professional judgment rather than a measured result.

That distinction defines what the report does and does not show. The institutional and legal facts are not in doubt: the inspector general established a likely statutory violation and a near-total loss of dedicated capacity, and ten members of Congress have now formally adopted that conclusion as the finding of their own investigation. The downstream civilian toll attributable to the cuts is, by contrast, genuinely uncertain. The statutes remain on the books and Congress retains the power of the purse, so the capacity can be rebuilt; as Congress drafts the FY2027 defense bills, it holds the most direct lever to compel the department back into compliance. The July 5 letter, with its 20 questions and its explicit charge of potential illegality, is the sharpest use of congressional oversight authority yet—but whether Congress converts that pressure into binding legislation remains, for now, an open question.