Even before President Trumpreturned 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 waragainst 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.
Source: Drudge Report
