Members of Congress have now had several weeks to digest the Defense Department Inspector General’s finding that the Pentagon is violating its own civilian harm policy and the federal laws requiring efforts to reduce civilian casualties in U.S. military operations. The report documents a sweeping erosion of the Department’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) capacity just as U.S. military activity is expanding across multiple theaters, with mounting allegations of civilian harm. Since late 2025, U.S. operations have included strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, in Venezuela, in Somalia, and in Iran, producing reports of nearly 200 civilians killed in unlawful boat strikes and at least 1,700 civilian casualties in Iran.
As Congress begins drafting the FY2027 defense authorization and appropriations bills, members have a narrow but critical window to act. They must seize this moment to halt the unraveling of U.S. civilian protection efforts and compel the Pentagon to rebuild the capacity it has dismantled before further harm becomes inevitable.
Background: Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR)
Nearly two decades of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria caused devastating civilian harm, with a 2021 study by the organization Airwars estimating more than 20,000 civilians killed in U.S. operations in those wars and in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Finally in 2018, Congress enacted a requirement through Section 936 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop a civilian harm policy. In 2022, in response to damning media reporting on botched airstrikes in Afghanistan and Syria and civil society demands for reform, the Pentagon released a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP). That Action Plan laid out an unprecedented set of reforms across the U.S. military to improve civilian protection and included the publication of the congressionally mandated policy for reducing civilian harm.
The Action Plan sequenced the implementation of more than 100 actions over the course of four years (FY2022 – FY2025). It required the DoD to place civilian harm mitigation and response teams at the various combatant commands, including personnel for conducting civilian harm assessments and analyzing the civilian environment. The plan also included the establishment of a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP COE), the updating of joint doctrine, the development of civilian harm trainings and exercises, integration of civilian protection practices into professional military education, and revised policies for responding to civilian harm, among many other initiatives. Research conducted by the organization where I work, the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), found that, by the end of 2024, the DoD had hired more than 160 personnel to fill these functions, many of which had become well-integrated into planning processes, the targeting cycle, and civilian harm assessment cells.
Just as the CHMR “enterprise,” as it is often to referred to by department officials, was established, staffed, and beginning to carry out its core mandate, the second Trump administration disrupted that momentum, appointing a secretary of defense with a notorious animosity towards the laws of war and slashing the workforce across DoD. Since the initiation of these staffing cuts and of related restructuring at the Department of the Army, CHMR staffing has been decimated to just 10 percent of its original size. Several combatant commands lost their entire CHMR teams, while others managed to retain a single person dedicated to the mission. The Center of Excellence, once at nearly 40 staff, is down to seven. The Pentagon cut CHMR resourcing in its FY2026 budget requests, but Congress appropriated $11.6 million anyway to preserve what they could, labeled “conflict operations analysis,” according to information obtained by CIVIC. This amount was significantly lower than the $72.8 million the DoD had previously estimated would be needed to fulfill the Action Plan’s requirements, based on a joint manpower assessment completed in 2024. Moreover, the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for FY 2027 appears to have fully zeroed out all dedicated CHMR funding.
Amid these cuts, U.S. military leaders — including Trump administration appointees — have affirmed the importance of maintaining the CHMR program, and veterans’ groups have called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to protect these programs due to the support they provide in upholding the values, morals, professionalism, and effectiveness of the U.S. military.
The DoD Inspector General Report
At the end of 2024, before President Donald Trump entered office in late January 2025, the DoD Office of the Inspector General self-initiated an evaluation of the CHMR Action Plan’s implementation. The report was completed amidst upheaval of the inspector general system, including the sudden dismissal of the Pentagon’s own inspector general, and a nearly year-long process to appoint his successor, whose actions and previous affiliation with the Trump administration has prompted concerns that the office may not truly be politically independent.
Nevertheless, many of the report’s findings align with CIVIC’s past research on implementation of this action plan under the previous administration. But the report also reveals that the Pentagon is violating its own policy and federal law regarding harm mitigation obligations. According to the report, the gutting of CHMR personnel and funding and its resulting failure to fully implement the CHMR-AP have rendered the DoD lacking “many of the personnel and tools designed to execute DoDI 3000.17 and meet the statutory purposes of the CP CoE.”
The report documents the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and the Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll submitting requests to Hegseth for the elimination of the Center of Excellence and for the rescission of the DoD Instruction on CHMR and the Action Plan. Fortunately, since the Center of Excellence was enshrined in law by 10 U.S.C. 184 and the DoD Instruction was similarly mandated in statute in 10 U.S.C. 134, DoD could not eliminate either without congressional action. As a result, both the Center of Excellence and the DOD Instruction are both still active — although significantly degraded in capacity and implementation — but they require congressional funding and support to function as intended.
The Inspector General’s evaluation team initially found that DoD was on track to complete its Action Plan objectives that were due to be met by the end of September 2025. However, by mid-2025, the IG team updated its status assessment for most objectives from “on track” to “at risk,” finding that many DoD components had stopped implementing their assigned actions in the Action Plan, the CHMR Steering Committee was no longer meeting, and combatant commands had “largely divested their CHMR personnel.” This led the IG team to ultimately conclude that DoD “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY2025.”
Recommendations by the Inspector General evaluation team and the responses from Under Secretary Colby illustrate fundamental differences in both entities’ understanding of the law and the responsibilities the law entails. For example, the IG report notes that the “Under Secretary did not agree with the need to develop and implement a plan to ensure compliance with statutory requirements,” as recommended by the report. The Under Secretary asserted that the DoD was already in compliance with 10 U.S.C. 134 since they had designated a senior civilian official responsible for CHMR. The Inspector General did not accept this assertion and explained that 10 U.S.C. 134 also mandates that the designated official must “develop, coordinate, and oversee compliance with” the department’s civilian harm policy.
Similarly, the Under Secretary argued that the DoD was complying with 10 U.S.C. 184 on the Center of Excellence because the center was still operating with a fulltime staff. In response, the report stated that the statute does not simply mandate the center be staffed, but that the law assigns specific tasks for the center to carry out. The Inspector General’s Office requested additional information and updates from the Under Secretary to ensure the department is moving toward fuller compliance with both statutes.
The Under Secretary concluded his response by stating that the “CP CoE and DoW policy [needed] to reflect current leadership’s priorities and direction,” and that a review was underway for both the Center of Excellence and the DoD Instruction that would be completed by the end of January 2026 and December 2026, respectively. It is unclear if either of these reviews were ever completed.
How Capability Loss is Driving Civilian Harm – and Strategic Risk
The IG report cites concerns from military officials that reduced CHMR resourcing not only increases the risk of civilian harm but endangers military personnel and mission success and decreases readiness, battlespace awareness, and legitimacy, among other disadvantages. This severe degradation of DoD’s capabilities for reducing harm to civilians has occurred just as U.S. operations are expanding across multiple theaters — including Iran, Somalia, Venezuela, the Caribbean and East Pacific, and Nigeria — with growing reports of civilian harm. CIVIC’s analysis aligns with the military officials’ statements in the IG report: without CHMR experts in place, the risks of U.S.-caused civilian harm increase. For example, the civilian environment teams at combatant commands, responsible for mapping population density, civilian infrastructure, and essential networks and services, were established to ensure commanders can anticipate potential second- and third-order effects on civilians before a strike. Without these teams, targeting decisions are more likely to rely on incomplete or outdated data, increasing the risk of errors like those now under investigation in Iran. The loss of red-teaming elements, designed to challenge assumptions and advise teams of civilian risks in advance, has weakened a critical internal check for preventing confirmation bias.
The dismantling of civilian harm assessment cells has similarly stymied the acknowledgement and redress for victims and survivors of harm and crippled the feedback loop that turns mistakes into improved practice. These teams were put in place to rapidly receive, review, and assess allegations of harm and identify patterns and lessons. Without them, commands like Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) that covers Central and South America and Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle East are now struggling to keep up with the reports they’re receiving about civilian casualties. CENTCOM’s civilian harm team has been cut from about 10 staff to 1 amid thousands of strikes in Iran. CENTCOM Commander Admiral Bradley Cooper demonstrated in congressional testimony that the command either does not have the capacity or does not have the will to review public reports of harm. When asked by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing if CENTCOM had looked into public reports of nearly 40 strikes on hospitals and schools in Iran, Cooper stated that they had not, despite department policy requiring them to do so. Five days later, Cooper testified to the House Armed Services Committee that he had spent the weekend with his team conducting those assessments, finding that only the Minab school strike correlated with a U.S. strike and U.S. munitions. This statement contradicts both civil society reporting on civilian harm in Iran and the DoD’s own civilian harm assessment procedures.
As the tempo and geographic scope of U.S. military operations has increased, the DoD has simultaneously dismantled the analytic, investigative, and learning architecture intended to reduce civilian harm, creating exactly the conditions under which civilian protection failures become more likely and more difficult to correct. Repeated congressional scrutiny now appears to be the only way to prompt the department to carry out its basic duty to prevent civilian harm.
Rebuilding Civilian Protection Now
On the same day the Inspector General’s report was released, U.S. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told Army Secretary Driscoll in his opening statement for an Army budget hearing, “You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm.” He continued, “I’d like to know either a) what the explanation is for why you think it’s okay for you to ignore the law that this Congress passes or b) what you’re planning to do to fix that problem.” Congress’s attention and pressure on this issue is critical to ensuring that the Defense Department’s civilian protection capabilities do not continue to deteriorate under the current leadership.
Congress is currently writing the defense authorization and appropriations bills for FY 2027, so members have a pivotal opportunity to sustain and rebuild the military’s civilian protection capabilities. It is imperative that Congress take the following steps:
- Explicitly appropriate sufficient funds for harm mitigation functions, including specific billets for CHMR personnel and the appropriate safeguards for ensuring the money is used specifically for CHMR.
- Designate a CHMR official at every operational combatant command, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the Joint Staff – a requirement already reflected in DoD policy and validated by commanders but not currently being followed.
- Complement the IG’s report on the implementation of the Action Plan by requiring a report on the implementation of the DoD Instruction itself, a critical part of implementing 10 U.S.C. 134.
- Finally, continue to exert pressure on the military for accountability and transparency related to its operations and the resulting civilian harm, particularly for operations in Iran such as the airstrike on the Minab school and ongoing extrajudicial killings via strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
The DOD should not wait for Congress to restore and enforce its CHMR capacity, however. It can and should act immediately to rebuild critical functions already within its authority. In line with the Inspector General’s recommendation to strengthen collaboration between the Center of Excellence and the military’s Joint Staff, DoD leadership should relocate the Center of Excellence from its current position within the Army to the Joint Staff. This move would better align with the center’s intended purpose of providing direct operational support to combatant commands and resolve ongoing friction, since the Army has signaled its desire to be relieved of hosting responsibilities and requested its disestablishment, as discussed in the IG’s report.
DoD must also ensure that appropriated funds are actually used to sustain CHMR capabilities. In the FY2026 appropriations, according to information obtained by CIVIC, Congress provided $11.6 million for “Conflict Operations Analysis” intended for civilian harm mitigation and response. It remains unclear how, or even whether, these resources have been directed toward that purpose. As Congress works to restore broader funding, the department should take the signal from its combatant commanders’ statements for the IG report and immediately begin reconstituting civilian protection teams at combatant commands and reinstating key personnel lost from the Center of Excellence and the policy team under the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Rebuilding this workforce is essential not just for compliance, but for restoring the DoD’s ability to anticipate, assess, and learn from civilian harm incidents.
Finally, a memo from the Inspector General affixed to the report upon release instructs the department to provide within 30 days a “response concerning specific actions in process or alternative corrective actions proposed on the recommendations.” Under Secretary Colby must provide a timely and good-faith response to the Inspector General outlining a concrete plan to return to compliance with federal law and the department’s civilian harm policy. This response should include clear timelines, responsible offices, and measurable benchmarks for rebuilding capacity. Absent these course corrections, the DoD will continue to expand global operations without the institutional safeguards to mitigate and respond to civilian harm, undermining both its legal and moral obligations and long-term strategic objectives.
