Last January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response, or CHMR, workers and replaced them with artificial intelligence.
The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was cut from 40 to just nine staffers at the beginning of last year. No new hires have been made since, leaving the center unable to do its job: protecting civilians from harm due to wars we’re fighting in their regions. Remaining staff also said they are not allowed to investigate incidents like the Minab elementary school bombing that left 120 children dead on the first day of the war in Iran.
CHMR suffered across the Defense Department, as AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and SOUTHCOM saw civilian casualty prevention infrastructure cut, signaling what has been obvious for years: Those casualties are not a moral priority for the United States. CENTCOM’s CHMR has only one person remaining, while cuts to SOUTHCOM’s team left them unable to identify the full scope of civilian harm in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
“The Hegseth regime held on to a thread of the program mostly in effort to be able to say they are following the law, but the reality is the Center and its efforts have had little to no influence on or oversight or visibility on operations,” former Protection Center Chief of civilian harm assessments Wes Bryant told The Intercept. “As long as they sit in the seat, they are continuing to try to put out good work, but the reality is, most of it is being thrown into the wind, and neither institutionalized nor operationalized.”
Now, instead of human beings, Hegseth is relying on a Palantir-created Maven Smart System, which a defense official claimed presents a “better layer of protection” for people living in places we’re currently attacking.
“The Department’s failure to implement the CHMR [Action Plan] has profound consequences for civilians in conflict zones and makes service members’ jobs harder and riskier,” Senator Elizabeth Warren and nine other Democrats wrote in a letter to Hegseth earlier this month. “Gutting CHMR programs leads to ‘target misidentification [that] harms readiness by wasting Do[D] munitions’ and increases the operational risk of ‘civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.’”
Thousands of Iranians have been killed since the downsizing of CHMR.