\n<\/p>\n
The Pentagon had<\/span> been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press<\/a>, nongovernmental organizations<\/a>, government<\/a>-supported think tanks<\/a>, and even the U.S. military <\/a>itself.<\/p>\n But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.<\/p>\n The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.<\/p>\n On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties. <\/p>\n The Army also recently announced<\/a> it will make law of war training<\/a> \u2014 which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement \u2014 optional<\/a>, in an effort to remove \u201cunnecessary distractions<\/a>\u201d and increase focus on \u201cdecisive action in combat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on \u201clethality<\/a>\u201d and cuts to programs <\/a>that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps<\/a>, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general<\/a> of the\u00a0Army, Navy, and Air Force.<\/p>\n Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks<\/a> and reports of civilian casualties<\/a> in war zones<\/a> like Somalia<\/a> and Yemen<\/a> spiked.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,\u201d said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon\u2019s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. \u201cBasically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth\u2019s priorities might mean for the world.\u00a0One of them mused that \u201clethality\u201d might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of \u201cwanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.\u201d<\/p>\n CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the \u201cCHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.\u201d<\/p>\n Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under different names. But even one of those former officials said that the CHMR enterprise was likely to end up \u201cstillborn,\u201d unable to even complete the phased implementation first laid out in the\u00a0Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan<\/a> \u2014\u00a0written at the direction of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin \u2014\u00a0that was released in 2022.<\/p>\n One official emphasized that CHMR\u2019s core principles provide more benefits to the military than an overriding focus on lethality. \u201cShrinking or perverting it beyond recognition or getting rid of it altogether does a disservice to the men and women of the DoD and the institution itself, not to mention the American public,\u201d that official said.<\/p>\n The Pentagon refuses to say whether Hegseth will rescind the CHMR instruction<\/a>, which established the Pentagon\u2019s policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to noncombatant casualties. \u201cWe have no new announcements to make regarding office closures or changes to policy at this time,\u201d an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson replied, by email, to repeated detailed questions.<\/p>\n \u201cDismantling these efforts would undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm from its operations \u2014 work that actually began under the first Trump administration,\u201d said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. \u201cCongress mandated many of these efforts through bipartisan legislation, and it must ensure that the programs it authorized and funded are not abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n Hegseth has made<\/span> it clear that enhancing his department\u2019s capacity to kill people is his number one priority. \u201cYour job [as secretary] is to make sure that it\u2019s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn\u2019t be happening,\u201d\u00a0he said<\/a>\u00a0during his confirmation process.\u00a0Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down.\u00a0\u201cWe will revive the warrior ethos,\u201d he announced<\/a>. \u201cWe will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n As a Fox News personality, Hegseth \u2014 a former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq \u2014 cast troops charged with war crimes as \u201cheroes<\/a>.\u201d During Trump\u2019s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for pardons of Army Lt. Clint Lorance<\/a> and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn<\/a>, and championed Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom was charged or convicted of war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion<\/a> of Gallagher,\u00a0tagging<\/a>\u00a0Hegseth in a tweet announcing the review of one of the cases.<\/p>\n Hegseth takes a dim view <\/a>of\u00a0the Geneva Conventions, which form the foundation of the law of armed conflict<\/a>, or LOAC, and remain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war<\/a> by protecting civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war, among others. In his 2024 book, \u201cThe War on Warriors,\u201d Hegseth asked, \u201cShould we follow the Geneva conventions? \u2026 Aren\u2019t we just better off in winning our wars according to our own rules?\u201d<\/p>\n At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that during his time in the military, \u201crestrictive rules of engagement\u201d\u00a0briefed to him by a military lawyer, known as a JAG, made war-fighting more difficult. But rules of engagement, which provide instructions for the use of deadly force in military operations, are issued by a senior commander \u2014 not a JAG officer.<\/p>\n Bryant \u2014 who worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, or JTAC, and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East before serving as chief of civilian harm assessment \u2014 said that Hegseth has little grasp of the laws of war.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Hegseth, you have a Secretary of Defense who really does not understand LOAC. Every time I\u2019ve heard him talking about his time in Afghanistan and the law of armed conflict,\u00a0he\u2019s talking about things that were not actually LOAC but policy,\u201d said Bryant. \u201cSo, Hegseth blames all his experiences of being overly restricted in combat on military lawyers and LOAC \u2014 when the types of operational restrictions he has cited have nothing to do with lawyers, the law of armed conflict, or international law.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n