The Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones.
Thursday’s scathing analysis by the Department of War’s inspector general came on the same day that the top U.S. commander overseeing the war in Iran dismissed reports of civilian casualties and said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools. The inspector general specifically notes that the military stopped funding a database that tracks civilian harm that could be used for such verification.
While damning, the former chief of harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence nonetheless called the new report a “whitewash” that downplays the evisceration of the Center and the entire enterprise devoted to reducing civilian casualties.
The report focuses on the implementation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP, which was mandated by the department to take full effect by the end of 2025. The inspector general found serious deficiencies and a chronic failure to meet timelines for 11 objectives consisting of 133 incomplete “implementing actions” by the end of last year. The inspector general found that the Department of War “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY 2025.”
“This is a crisis of the Trump Administration’s own making: They slashed the staffing and funding for civilian harm mitigation, and now they can’t adequately follow the law and implement the CHMR-AP, leaving civilians and our own military personnel at risk,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept. “The Inspector General’s report is clear about what that means: wasted munitions, failed strikes, damaged alliances, and propaganda wins for our adversaries. The Trump Administration needs to reverse course immediately so we can save lives and protect our national security.”
The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of CHMR efforts. More than a year ago, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties.
The 43-page inspector general report details continuing efforts to hamstring protections for civilians in war zones, noting that “DoW Components ended funding for the CHMR data management platform, stopped holding Steering Committee meetings, lost or reassigned many of the personnel dedicated to CHMR, and lost personnel and leadership” at the Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and employing tools for preventing civilian casualties.
“What exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority.”
Wes Bryant, who until last year served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Center of Excellence, is one of those “lost personnel,” having been forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on efforts to dismantle CHMR efforts.
“It is completely whitewashed of the truth,” Bryant said of the report. “It reads as if the IG is completely deliberately ignoring the fact that the center and the entire CHMR enterprise was targeted for immediate shutdown, that 90 percent of billets were either terminated or forced out, and that what exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority and is completely locked out of visibility and oversight on all investigations and operations.”
The watchdog’s evaluation noted that Hegseth’s War Department “may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy” — which is required under federal law. The investigation also found that eliminating CHMR funding and personnel also “decreases readiness and increases risk to DoW personnel, mission success, and military objectives,” according to officials at the Joint Staff, which is headed by Gen. Dan Caine, and at geographic combatant commands, which oversee U.S. operations in various corners of the world.
While couched in stilted language, the report details dangers to civilians due to cuts to CHMR efforts. It makes note of deficiencies in “personnel and capabilities” to protect civilians under Pentagon regulations that are mandated by federal law. And it mentions a lack of necessary “tools” at the Center of Excellence, including a “data management platform” meant to track civilian harm incidents. The report notes that “according to Joint Staff and [combatant command] officials, eliminating CHMR funding and personnel makes mitigating or responding to civilian harm more difficult.” Such officials also noted that “eliminating CHMR funding and personnel reduces battle space awareness and increases the risk of civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.”
“This report makes it clear that the DoD is not complying with the law, nor its own policies, both of which were built on a bipartisan basis upon years of hard-learned lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “As Congress develops the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they must ensure that it not only provides the DoD with the resources it needs to comply with law and policy but also conduct rigorous oversight to keep the DoD accountable for implementing these critical programs.”
Reporting by The Intercept found a combatant command that has gone from a military backwater to one engaged in regular kinetic activity — U.S. Southern Command — is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January , the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America. The organization learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Center of Excellence.
The report specifically mentions the Center’s “support for organizations such as the U.S. Southern Command,” despite the fact that the Center “lost large numbers of personnel and leaders,” does not have “the tools designed to meet its statutory roles and duties,” and that the Army had developed plans, early last year, to euthanize it.
The report notes that an official from an unnamed combatant command “stated that they largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025.” Another said that they did not “want to spend resources on actions or make future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed.”
As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.
The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school. More than 150 civilians were killed, most of them children.
Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society last month; this includes 763 schools. The Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.
“U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing late last month.
On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper — the senior officer overseeing U.S. combat operations in Iran — told senators that the strike on the school in Minab was the only civilian casualty incident he knew of after more than 13,600 U.S. strikes.
Airwars has chronicled more than 300 civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.
“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., citing a New York Times report. “There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied.
The inspector general’s report specifically says that a database used for tracking civilian harm — which could be used in verification efforts — was abandoned. The “Army stopped funding the data management platform,” it notes.
Cooper said that preventing civilian harm is “a matter that I’m passionate about.”
Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.
Late last month, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.
While the U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, Trump has previously threatened to commit genocide there. “We’ll go back and finish them off. And, by the way, more than that,” he said on Friday.
Bryant believes that efforts by congressional Democrats and press coverage of civilian casualties — and the ensuing pressure on Hegseth — has kept the lights on at what remains of the Center of Excellence and held CHMR on life support. “Given all the controversy and heat that Hegseth and the administration have since received for civilian casualties, it has behooved them to be able to technically say that some semblance of the program still exists,” he told The Intercept. “However, I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that it exists at this point entirely on paper and as a legal CYA,” or cover your ass.
