The United States developed a plan to avoid civilian casualties of war. Trump officials abandoned him.

The images of the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrific than any of the case studies that Air Force veteran Wes J. Bryant has pored over in his mission to rethink how the U.S. military protects civilian life.

Parents cried over the bodies of their children. Crushed desks and bloodstained backpacks pierced the rubble. The death toll from the attack on a primary school in Minab has exceeded 165, mostly under the age of 12, and nearly 100 others have been injured, according to Iranian health authorities. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves have gone viral, a devastating emblem of the first day of open war between the United States and Israel in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think what-ifs as he monitored the fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he was a senior advisor in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing harm to civilians during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the Army was taking reforms seriously. He worked at a recently opened Civil Defense Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a strike team veteran who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, this momentum has disappeared. Bryant was forced out of government following budget cuts last spring. The civil defense mission was disbanded when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if US responsibility were confirmed, would represent the largest number of civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Defense analysts say dismantling nascent risk-reduction efforts is one of several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides have lowered the authorization level for deadly force, expanded target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security officials. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“We are deviating from the rules and norms that we have tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There is no accountability.”

Citing open source intelligence and government officials, several media outlets concluded that the strike at Minab was most likely led by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters on March 7, that it had been “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, open source research company Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike near the Minab school. Iranian state media later showed fragments of an American-made Tomahawk, identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. UN human rights experts have requested an investigation whether the attack violated international law.

The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive US administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials, eager to shake off the legacy of “forever wars,” have periodically called for better protection of civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in 2022 action plan and in a Instruction from the Ministry of Defensethe initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often abbreviated to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 people were assigned to the mission, including around thirty to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination center close to the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of civilian presence in an area and in-depth risk analysis. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would result in an assessment or investigation to determine what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to office, damage mitigation teams were embedded within regional commands and the Special Operations Directorate. Several Trump nominees for top defense posts in Senate confirmation hearings support expressed for the mission. Once in power, however, they stood idly by while the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

About 90 percent of the CHMR mission is gone, former staffers said, with now more than a single advisor in most commands. At Central Command, where the team of 10 was reduced to one, “a handful” of eliminated positions were replaced to help with the campaign against Iran. Defense officials can’t officially close the Civil Defense Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission, no mandate, no budget,” Bryant said.

Peak strikes

Observers of global conflicts have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly US military operations. Even before the campaign against Iran, the number of strikes around the world since Trump’s return to power had increased. exceeded the total of the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

If the Defense Department’s risk reduction mission had continued apace, current and former officials say, those policies would almost certainly have reduced the number of injured noncombatants over the past year.

Beyond moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruitment and hamper intelligence gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains risk in an equation he calls “insurgent mathematics»: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

US-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to the human rights activists’ news agencya US-based group that verifies victims through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds of additional deaths are being investigated, a difficult process given Iran’s internet outage and dangerous conditions.

Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the campaign against Iran, added to dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens the dark chapters of the “war on terror” that initially motivated reforms.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’: every day we kill people and make more and more enemies.”

In 2015, two A dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. warplane fired for more than an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that became a warning for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot in the air as they fled the burning building,” the international humanitarian organization said. in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A American military investigation found that multiple human and systemic errors led the response team to mistake the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payments of $6,000 to the families of the dead.

Human rights advocates hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military to take concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. However, a few years later, the problem returned with heavy civilian casualties in the U.S.-led effort to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

In a single week in March 2017, American operations resulted in three incidents causing numerous civilian casualties: drone attack in a mosque in Syria, around fifty dead; a strike in another part of Syria, 40 people were killed in a school full of displaced families; and bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse who killed more than 100 people who had taken refuge inside.

In the fierce US battles to break Islamic State’s control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a comprehensive view of conditions on the ground; too often they ignored reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to one report. analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent think tank Rand Corp.

“Do it now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, James Mattis, then Trump’s defense secretary, ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the magazine launched by Mattis was seen by some advocacy groups although limited in scope, it is nevertheless a step in the right direction. Yet the issue quickly faded from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and historic protests for racial justice.

During the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan by the Biden administration in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Lloyd Austin, then Secretary of Defense, apologized and said the department would “work to learn from this horrible mistake.”

This incident, along with a New York Times article investigative series in deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred adoption of the Civil Damage Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022. When they created the new Civil Defense Center of Excellence the following year, defense officials called on Michael McNerney – the lead author of the brutal RAND report – will be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul made Austin say, ‘Do it now,’” Bryant said.

The first damage mitigation teams were assigned to leaders responsible for some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR advisor who arrived in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a budget of $7 million and in-depth expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

A few years ago, he recalls, he had to beg the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a side issue: the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on that.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the damage mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail during a private briefing for aides to Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of CHMR’s mission by Friend Frank Bradley, who was head of Joint Special Operations Command at the time. In October, Bradley was promoted to head Special Operations Command.

In late 2024 and early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, conducted “comprehensive retrospective analyses” of civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the results to force changes. It also introduced training on how to integrate damage prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We looked at Bradley as a role model,” Bryant said.

Yet the military is slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies are difficult to independently monitor, a report said. Stimson Center reporta foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program has also faced opposition from critics who argue that the protection of civilians is already enshrined in the laws of war and targeting protocols; THE argument is that additional oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ ability to quickly adapt operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers should break a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The first instinctual response from all commands,” Bryant said, “is, ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’ »

Reforms revealed

As the Trump administration returned to the White House promising deep cuts to the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the civilian harm mitigation and response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were encouraged by Senate confirmation hearings in which Trump’s nominees for top defense posts affirmed their support for protecting civilians.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote upon confirmation that commanders “see the positive impacts of the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote this it is in the national interest to “seek to reduce harm to civilians as much as possible.”

When asked about discounts At a hearing on the CHMR mission last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating these ideas as “a part of our culture.”

Despite the high level supportAccording to current and former officials, the CHMR mission had no chance under Hegseth’s lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as a National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disregards the rules of engagement and other safeguards as constraining the “warrior ethos”. He has defended American troops accused of war crimesincluding a Navy SEAL accused of stabbing a jailed teenage activist to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking office, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations compliant with U.S. and international law. Hegseth has described the lawyers as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff”.

At the Civil Defense Center of Excellence, staff tried unsuccessfully to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of ​​renaming it “Center for Precision Warfare” to describe the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By the end of February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, current and former military personnel say.

Shortly before his position was eliminated, Bryant spoke out openly against budget cuts. The Washington Post And Boston Globewhich he says caused him serious problems at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, with his security clearance at risk of being revoked.

Bryant officially resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policy. In columns and on television, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and the protection of civilians is eroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was difficult to see Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic CHMR follower, defend a controversial “double tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a subsequent hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate the laws of war. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts to go wrong when there is this culture of greater tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the relaunch of the Trump administration’s counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants clustered in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a US airstrike hit a immigration detention center in northwest Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens more in what Amnesty International said “is being described as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia have also become more deadly. In 2024, the final year of Biden’s term, conflict observers recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a total death toll of 189. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the United States carried out at least 125 strikes, killing as many as 359 people, according to the New America Think Tankwhich monitors counterterrorism operations.

“This is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the American army announced an attack in northeastern Somalia, targeting an arms dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. But on the ground, the villagers said The missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military did not release any details, citing operational security.

“The United States killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother Ali told Somali media. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former staffers say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

As part of abandoning the damage prevention framework, they said, plans to protect civilians would have begun months ago, when the order to develop a possible campaign against Iran likely came from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across all commands would immediately begin detailed mapping of what planners call the “civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly prohibited.

A key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It is located a few meters from a naval base of s Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The building was once part of the base, although it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensic investigations.

“Anyone who ‘pushes the button’ on a Tomahawk is part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they push that button, they’re not going to hit school kids.”

If the guardrails failed and the Department of Defense faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have stepped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate investigation.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“We’re back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will be considered one of the most egregious failures of targeting and civilian harm mitigation in modern U.S. history.”