By Mike Nelson
Tuesday, September 01, 2026
Five years ago, three days after the Abbey Gate bombing
that killed 13 U.S. service members amid the evacuation from Afghanistan, U.S.
forces conducted a strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.
The strike came after most of the intelligence collection
assets that had facilitated operations throughout the 20-year war had been
withdrawn. No one had anticipated the need to return to evacuate Hamid Karzai
International Airport during the tragic fall of Kabul, instead relying on the
naïve concept of “over-the-horizon” visibility to conduct counterterror
operations. This horrendous mistake, and the overconfidence in over-the-horizon
strikes with limited understanding, was widely criticized by defense observers.
As one such observer said in the weeks after the strike, “The conditions that
they willfully created, which created an over-the-horizon capacity that was
utterly insufficient and led to this type of tragic situation happening. That’s
on them, and there's been no accountability for it.”
The observer making this damning assessment, blaming the
Biden administration and military officials, was then-Fox News personality Pete
Hegseth.
It’s odd, then, that Hegseth seems to have made a
180-degree turn on the topic of civilian harm mitigation now that he is in a
position to actually do something about it. But reporting from ProPublica
last week revealed that the defense secretary has gutted a program
designed to safeguard civilians that was developed in response to that tragic
Kabul strike.
***
No matter how much one might wish to, one will never
reduce risk in warfare to zero. Even with advances in force protection and the
extended range and targeting precision of modern munitions, the immutable
truths of conflict will mean people will always be killed and maimed. Some of
that is by design. The essence of warfare, after all, is compelling an
adversary to accept an outcome they would not otherwise by imposing
unsustainable costs—costs in materiel, supplies, and, yes, in lives.
But the savage nature of war does not mean nations should
default to unrestrained savagery. After millennia of unbridled conflict and
atrocities, humanity has tried, as much as possible, to reduce the suffering
inherent in warfare—both in terms of the actual violence (e.g., limiting
munitions that create greater suffering or inhumane deaths) and in terms of who
is targeted, attempting to limit the toll on civilians and noncombatants as
much as is feasible. This principle has been codified, in spirit and in various
formal treaties, in a series of international agreements since the end of World
War I, collectively referred to as the Law of Armed Conflict. It has been
formalized in U.S. law and regulations governing the U.S. military. It has
become part of the American identity and sense of our role in the world: We,
unlike the evil regimes we have defeated, do not revel in the suffering of the
innocent. And, it’s not just a matter of morality, it is also a matter of
pragmatism; protecting the innocent helps guard against hardening the enemy’s
population into greater animosity and resistance.
The Nazis discovered this when they engaged in a campaign
to break the British will during the Blitz, intentionally targeting civilian
population centers in the belief it would weaken British resolve. In fact, it
had the opposite effect, helping to rally the British spirit and commitment.
But, like all things in war, there is a natural tension
between goals. If one strictly commits to never harming a civilian, even
accidentally, the burdensome and prohibitive procedures to remove all fog of
war, or the paralysis without that surety, can lead to indecision, inaction,
and failure to bring the war to a decisive close. If one chooses the
opposite—reckless violence of action without pause or attempt at civilian
protection—they lose all moral standing and end up creating counterproductive
results. These tensions remain constant—either in large-scale conventional
operations where centers of gravity can be found in proximity to population
centers, and in smaller-scale, low-grade conflicts in which insurgents choose
to fight in and among the population.
To deal with these realities, the United States has
sought to refine techniques and adapt technologies that allow for both
safeguarding civilians and efficient warfighting. During the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, our surveillance techniques and drone technology improved to take
away some of the guesswork from determining whether targets were close to
civilians (although never fully reducing that risk to zero). We continued to
make improvements, giving us far more fidelity and understanding prior to strikes
than we had at the beginning of the wars. And after the strike that killed 10
civilians in Kabul, the Pentagon began the Civilian Harm and Mitigation risk
program.
***
Since becoming secretary of defense, Hegseth has made
clear that he believes the kinds of oversight and checks for legality or safety
forwarded by the Civilian Harm and Mitigation risk program are woke hindrances
that bind the hands of real fighters whose pure aggression would otherwise
carry the day. As recently as last week, during an event marking the five-year
anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing that precipitated the subsequent
misguided Kabul drone strike, Hegseth stated, “We are stating clearly that America’s warriors
will be fiercely supported and our military’s lethal edge will not be
compromised by desk-bound bureaucracy or lawyers in the cheap seats.” Hegseth
seems to be amplifying the mistaken belief that if we had just done more
wholesale killing in Afghanistan, without those pesky lawyers and their
tiresome expectations of reducing civilian harm, the war might have turned out
differently.
It hasn’t just been a rhetorical drumbeat from Hegseth,
with this kind of line making its way into most of his speeches, right up there
with his greatest hits including “no more dudes in dresses.” He has also
implemented actual policy changes and weighed in to influence investigations
into legal and safety violations. After repeated potential aviation safety
incidents, Hegseth overruled commanders examining the circumstances to say the
pilots had his tacit permission despite not waiting for the facts. After one of
the earliest strikes in the Trump administration’s campaign against Caribbean
drug boats raised eyebrows about law of warfare violations, Hegseth quickly
dismissed any concerns and berated those who raised the issue as “fake
news” who want to “discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the
homeland.”
But the greatest indicator of Hegseth’s belief in the
concept that speed and free rein equal lethality and, therefore, victory, and
that oversight and confirmation are weak and woke is his decision to gut the
Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) program early in his tenure.
CHMR was meant to provide commanders with greater
understanding of the civilian environment in which operations might occur, to
recommend options to reduce civilian harm, and, when allegations or suspicion
of U.S.-caused civilian casualties are raised, determine whether they occurred
through American fault, where the failure was, and what could be done to
prevent such an occurrence in the future. Personnel dedicated to this program
were embedded in warfighting headquarters throughout the Department of Defense,
intended to act as mission-enhancing staff to their commanders.
But in Hegseth’s eyes, it seems, this was exactly the
kind of “desk-bound bureaucracy” for which he held so much contempt, and which
he believed was hamstringing his warfighters. Within the first few months of
the second Trump administration, according to ProPublica, Hegseth had decided the
program needed to go and polled his subordinate combatant commanders as to how
deeply he should gut the program—the question wasn’t whether to reduce
the effectiveness of CHMR, but how much, all without having asked
the actual warfighters whether it was essential. Hegseth asked commanders to
select which option they preferred: reduce their CHMR offices by two-thirds,
eliminate the CHMR offices in each headquarters and maintain a small, centralized
office at the DOD, or eliminate it entirely. Maintaining the effort as it had
been was not an option. The results were probably not what Hegseth expected. Of
the 11 unified combatant commands, nine selected the first option, deemed the
least disruptive. But two of the combatant commands—Central Command, the
headquarters charged with operations in the Middle East and currently fighting
the Iran war, and Strategic Command, the command responsible for American
global strike nuclear options—declined to answer from the choices given and,
instead, replied that maintaining the effort in its existing form was essential
to their ability to operate. In a response to the inquiry, then CENTCOM
Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla (hardly a woke milquetoast squish—he once fought an
insurgent one-on-one in a Mosul alleyway) said diminishing CHMR at CENTCOM
would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an
increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness.”
Despite these objections, CHMR has been largely
dismantled. By the time Operation Epic Fury began in February, the entire CHMR
effort had been reduced more than 85 percent from the roughly 200 personnel
previously assigned to do the work. In CENTCOM, the warfighting headquarters
that had authorized the August 2021 Kabul strike and that was continuing to
conduct the kind of strikes CHMR was meant to assist, the number of personnel
had fallen from 16 to one.
This is particularly notable because Epic Fury began with
CENTCOM launching an overwhelming volley of attacks from aircraft, ships, and
surface-based missiles, all following targeting data to their
destinations—destinations that seem to have included the Shajareh Tayyebeh
Elementary School in Minab, resulting in more than 150 deaths, mainly children,
on the first day of the war.
It is a tragic reality that oftentimes the deaths of
civilians in warfare are not inherently war crimes; quite often they result
from accidents. Sometimes, these accidents are due to woeful neglect or failure
to try to prevent them. Often, they are the result of fog-of-war confusion, or
the unfortunate proximity of civilians to lawful combatants. But regardless of
the underlying cause, civilian harm is a tragedy. The Minab school strike is
exactly the kind of abomination CHMR was designed to prevent or, at a minimum,
investigate in the aftermath. But now, six months later, we still do not have a
full determination for how the tragedy happened, what mistakes are being
corrected for the future, and if there is any accountability. Rather, as has
become the norm, we have had a series of White House and Pentagon dismissals
and obfuscations, from the ridiculous claim the Iranians struck the school
themselves to the stalling explanation that the investigation is still ongoing.
We are marking the five-year anniversary of a tragic
strike that killed innocent civilians, which had been loudly condemned by
Hegseth, and which led to the DoD-wide program to prevent such incidents in the
future, as we also mark the six-month anniversary of an even greater tragedy,
most likely enabled by the dismantling of that program by the same person who
had criticized the original incident. It appears Hegseth probably never saw
virtue in protecting civilians and only saw utility in the incident as a cudgel
against Biden, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs Chairman
Gen. Mark Milley. Nor does it seem that Hegseth has any interest in the
transparency and accountability he claimed to seek, as he is unwilling to tell
the simple truth about the strike in Minab.
As conflicts both past and present show us, civilians
will continue to be killed and maimed on a great scale unless the combatants
take precautions to prevent harm. While it does not appear Hegseth will ever
mature into more than a personification of tough-guy slogans in ill-fitting
suits, the DoD should reimplement procedures to protect the civilian
populations among whom we will fight as soon as he is gone. We can only hope
the next secretary demonstrates the wisdom and exercises the judgment that Hegseth
lacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment