By Missy Ryan
Monday, March 09, 2026
Even before President Trump returned to office, his
advisers sought to remove what they saw as unnecessary constraints on the way
the American military fights. The man Trump had tapped to lead the Pentagon,
Pete Hegseth, had long complained about “weak” and “woke” policies that he believed
were hampering the cause of battlefield victory.
In early 2025, ahead of Trump’s second inauguration,
members of his transition team asked military officials to review and
potentially close a unit—a “center of excellence,” in Pentagon
parlance—established to help the military devise better strategies to protect
civilians. The creation of the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence in 2023
was part of an effort to understand why thousands of noncombatants had died in
the battle against the Islamic State terrorist group and to find ways to limit
civilian deaths in counterinsurgency struggles.
The center was created by law, so it couldn’t be closed
outright. But the administration has dramatically reduced staffing there and
fired or reassigned personnel focused on preventing civilian harm across the
military. Total staff working on the issue across the military, which numbered
nearly 200 at its peak, has been reduced by about 90 percent over the past
year, people familiar with the matter told me.
Today, the U.S. Navy and Air Force (and their Israeli
partners) are waging an all-out air campaign against the Iranian regime,
dismantling military capabilities and destroying ships, missile sites, and
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command sites in thousands of strikes over
the past nine days. Civilian casualties are already a prominent issue. Shortly
after the start of the bombing campaign, a strike on a girls’ school in
southern Iran killed about 170 civilians, Iranian officials say, most of them children.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, is
investigating.
Hegseth—a former National Guardsman who rose to
prominence by vowing to restore a “warrior ethos” that he argues was eroded by
undue deference to military attorneys and international law—has remained
defiant. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no
democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” he declared on the
war’s third day. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”
The bellicose messaging from the administration has been
accompanied by a sharp reduction in the number of staff focused on minimizing
civilian casualties.
At CENTCOM, the number of people working full-time on the
issue was cut by two-thirds, leaving only a handful, although some staff
members have been reassigned to work on the issue during the Iran campaign, one
person familiar with the staffing said. CENTCOM and other commands have fired
or reassigned officials whose job was to ensure that civilian sites such as
schools are avoided in strike planning, and to propose alternatives for targets
that carry a high risk of killing noncombatants. “One chief problem I see are
arbitrary constraints put on these good practices for ideological reasons,” a
person familiar with the issue—who, like others involved, requested anonymity
for fear of retaliation—told me. Asked for comment, the Pentagon pointed me to
a social-media post by the spokesperson Sean Parnell that said Iran was
positioning missile and drone launchers in residential areas. “We’ve seen this
cowardly strategy before—it’s no accident,” he wrote.
Trump and Hegseth have suggested that the toll at the
girls’ school was the result of an Iranian misfire. “The only side that targets
civilians is Iran,” Hegseth said alongside the president on Air Force One on
Saturday. But the pattern of strikes on the school and at least seven nearby
IRGC naval sites suggests a strike by guided munitions rather than an errant
Iranian projectile, a Human Rights Watch analysis concluded, and video of the
incident appears to show a tomahawk missile, which the U.S., not Iran, employs.
(Iran, which alleges that U.S. and Israeli strikes over the past 10 days have
killed more than 1,300 people, has meanwhile pounded Israel and Gulf nations
with hundreds of missile and drone attacks, leading to civilian deaths.) The
White House’s own messaging has not suggested extensive calibration to avoid
civilian casualties. Instead, it has released a series of social-media posts
mixing video games or action-movie clips with imagery of exploding Iranian
targets. “No pause. No hesitation,” one such post says above grainy strike
images, punctuated by an explosion emoji.
The overriding priority now is lethality, and protecting
civilians “has been de-emphasized across the targeting and strike community,”
one person familiar with the matter told me. That may be welcome news to some
in the military, who chafed against certain restrictions on their ability to
fight. But the changes have increased the potential for civilian casualties by
scotching what many saw as a worthy effort to apply morality and American
sensibilities to the messiness of war. “Political decisions and rhetoric at the
top are undermining this work,” Annie Shiel, the U.S.-advocacy director at the
Center for Civilians in Conflict, told me. “Civilians are ultimately paying the
price.”
***
At the height of the war against the Islamic State, in
2017, U.S. military officials received an urgent appeal from the Iraqi ground
forces they were supporting in the city of Mosul. ISIS snipers on the second
story of a nearby house had pinned down a detachment, and the Iraqis asked
whether American planes could help. U.S. commanders authorized aircraft to drop
a single 500-pound precision bomb. What they didn’t know was that more than 100
civilians had taken shelter on the lower floor of the building. When the bomb
struck, it ignited a hidden cache of explosives, killing everyone inside. That
incident created the worst civilian toll of the air campaign against the
Islamic State and the biggest single loss of noncombatant life due to U.S.
military action since 2003.
Trump’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Marine General Joseph Dunford Jr., commissioned a classified
study that sought to examine what had gone wrong in the Islamic State air
war, and why the military’s estimates of errant deaths were so starkly lower
than the tallies amassed by outside groups. Airwars, a monitoring group that
worked closely with the military, estimated that more than 8,000 civilians were
killed in nine years of air strikes against ISIS; the military acknowledged
about 1,400. Dunford and other military leaders took the issue seriously, not
just for ethical reasons but because of a central truth of counterinsurgency:
To ignore accidental deaths was to lock America into generations of conflict.
I spent years writing about the military’s struggle to
ensure that its operations killed the people they intended to kill—and no one
else. I found that military officials generally wanted to avoid unnecessary
bloodshed and were frustrated when their precautions failed them. Over the
years, those safeguards included calculating a strike’s expected blast radius,
estimating collateral damage, and using a practice, called “shift cold,” that
allows officials to abort a strike in its final seconds if, for example, a
child walks into the target area. Everyone understood that the task was
challenging, especially in places (like Iran) where the United States has few
or no personnel on the ground, and where militants employ human shields. A
general who commanded an operations center in Iraq once told me he saw an
Islamic State militant dashing between buildings with a baby above his head,
knowing the child would protect him.
Eventually, the Pentagon established a new system for
improving its record on what it called “civilian harm,” establishing the center
of excellence, creating a new military-wide policy on protecting civilians
(which is still on the books), and making changes to the military’s targeting
manual. The new apparatus also assigned personnel to combatant commands and set
up new “civilian environment teams,” whose members advised planners on local
customs and patterns of life to make strikes more precise. Other personnel were
assigned to targeting cells or to investigating incidents when they occurred.
Trump at times has shown consideration for the likelihood
of civilian harm. In 2019, he said he called off a planned retaliatory strike
on Iran at the last minute after learning that 150 Iranian officials could be
killed, an act that he believed was disproportionate to Tehran’s downing of a
U.S. drone. Within the military, though, there has always been some friction
around the effort to strike the right balance between “military effects,” a
euphemism for adversaries’ deaths, and protecting noncombatants. In the fight
against ISIS, some commanders were frustrated by what they saw as overly
restrictive rules. They wanted to be able to exercise judgment and avoid
bureaucratic processes for strike approval. Over time, commanders were
permitted to widen the pool of targets to banks and oil rigs for their role in
financing the enemy, and to conduct strikes with a larger number of acceptable
civilian casualties.
To mitigate the internal resistance, the Pentagon, during
the Biden administration, hired military insiders to run the
civilian-harm-reduction efforts, typically those who had worked as targeters,
civil-affairs specialists, or troops who called in air strikes. People familiar
with the system described it as a work in progress, an effort to change an
established way of waging war, little by little. “There was always this
hesitation from some who would say, ‘Hey, war is terrible, but what are you
going to do?’” one person familiar with the process told me. “It was a balance,
but the pendulum did swing a bit more toward protection.”
***
When I talked with Pentagon officials who worked on this
issue shortly ahead of Trump’s return to office in 2025, they told me they were
confident that the new apparatus would endure. They argued that there had not
been any effort to place fresh constraints on service members’ actions or impose
penalties when things went wrong. The intent was to provide operators with a
clearer picture of the battlefield, allowing them to achieve results without
unintended consequences. But Trump’s new advisers ordered the system’s
dismantling anyway. The Pentagon also pulled the plug at the last minute on a
planned database of errant strikes, which had been developed at a cost of
millions of dollars, people familiar with the issue said. And the
administration closed a State Department initiative to track civilian deaths
caused by weapons that the United States provides to allies, and repealed a
White House weapons-transfer policy that emphasized human rights.
Not everyone was upset by these moves. Many in the ranks
have welcomed the changes because “they now feel unleashed,” one person
familiar with the issue told me.
Trump, in the past year, has ordered military engagements
in countries including Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Nigeria, Yemen, and Somalia and
has threatened to invade Greenland, part of a NATO ally. Hegseth has empowered
commanders to conduct more air strikes without seeking higher-level approval.
He has also faced questions from lawmakers over the targeting of small boats in
the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that the U.S. claimed were legitimate
narco-trafficking targets, an accusation for which the Pentagon has declined to
provide evidence. In one case, two survivors were clinging to wreckage and
appeared to signal for help before they were killed in a follow-on attack.
Some within the Pentagon believe that the
anti-civilian-harm program will have a lasting effect, even with the reductions
in staff, including through references in the targeting guide to the “civilian
environment” and the inclusion of (notional) civilians in training and
exercises.
Hegseth’s rhetoric is perhaps the starkest change, given
the solemnity that I’ve seen Pentagon leaders generally employ when discussing
the use of military force. Hegseth, from his perch at Fox News during Trump’s
first term, advocated for lenient treatment of service members who were accused
of war crimes. In his 2024 book, Hegseth derided overly cautious commanders and
military judge advocates general—“jagoffs,” in his description—who seek to
constrain battlefield operations and investigate claims of errant behavior. He
also recounted telling his platoon in Iraq to disregard the rules of
engagement.
People familiar with the situation told me they are now
concerned that Hegseth’s approach will lead to unintended casualties in the
Iran campaign that might have been otherwise avoided.
Emily Tripp, Airwars’ executive director, told me that
the United States had emerged over the years as a global leader in using its
power in a responsible way, with a system to prevent civilian harm more
advanced and transparent than that of its peers. But that advantage may already
be eroding. Trump last year launched Operation Rough Rider against Houthi
rebels in Yemen, which involved roughly 800 strikes in the first six weeks.
That is far fewer than the more than 1,700 targets struck in the first 72 hours
in Iran.
Watchdog groups believe that hundreds of civilians died in the Yemen operation.
More than a year later, the Pentagon has not released any findings of
investigations into those alleged deaths.
No comments:
Post a Comment