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In its first year under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon dramatically slashed its teams responsible for taking efforts to reduce civilian harm in military conflicts, new reporting finds — an undertaking that continued until as little as months before the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Minab, Iran, in one of the worst single incidents of a civilian massacre committed by the U.S. in modern history.

A report on the cuts to civilian harm reduction staff, reported by The Intercept, finds that, between January 2025 and the end of the year, the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was slashed from 40 to just nine. In that time, the Pentagon also stopped developing a database that would have helped track incidents where civilians were harmed by U.S. actions.

These slashes to civilian harm mitigation and response, abbreviated as CMHR, were done across the Department of Defense.

For instance, such staff at Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military activity in the Middle East, were cut from 10 to one. When U.K. watchdog group Airwars tried to submit documentation of civilian casualties to Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has directed the........

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