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Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments

An unreleased Pentagon report says its center devoted to protecting civilians cut most of its staff and scrapped a records database while developing an AI assistant to speed up work.

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones, cutting staff, scrapping a civilian harm records database, and developing an AI assistant to accelerate assessments, according to a new report shared with The Intercept. These revelations come as the Trump administration has renewed attacks on civilian sites in Iran.

The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence has reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. Two current defense officials confirmed that staffing levels remain the same today. Current and former government officials say the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians.

The tiny contingent that remains at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the officials said, are also prevented from investigating major civilian casualty incidents like the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

Wes Bryant, who served as the Center’s chief of civilian harm assessments, was one of the more than 30 people pushed out last year by the War Department. He told The Intercept that the Center was being kept on life support to provide cover for the Pentagon.

“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,” Bryant said. “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.”

Before civilian harm mitigation and response (CMHR) efforts were sidelined and the staff downsized last year, the Center completed basic civilian harm mitigation training for 212 personnel from military combatant commands like Central Command and Africa Command, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies, according to the report.

Established in 2023, the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was just “hitting its stride” in late 2024, a defense official told The Intercept. When the center was staffed by 40 civilians, troops, and contractors at the beginning of last year, it was on track “to achieve Full Operational Capability” by the end of 2025, according to the report. That never came to fruition, as the Center saw its staff slashed to seven civilians and two members of the military. 

“The COE was cut down shortly after becoming fully operational,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager at Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “They had minimal time to show value, but they were still able to inject critical CHMR expertise to all corners of the U.S. military, even as their staff dwindled down to a handful of people.”

The report also details financial constraints that have crippled the entire civilian harm mitigation and response enterprise across the War Department. “DoW-wide budgets for CHMR in FY26 were cut,” reads the report which notes that staff and programs across the entire Department of War — including at combatant commands like AFRICOM and CENTCOM — “were gradually reorganized, reduced, and/or terminated by the end of FY25.”

The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM, for example, has been reduced to just one individual, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the command’s chief. Reporting by The Intercept also found U.S. Southern Command was unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January. When the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars........

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