Self styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s gutting of a Pentagon program aimed at reducing civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations has been widely reported from the time he started it shortly after taking office in 2025. Not previously known was that the military’s top commanders opposed taking an axe to that program, seeing it as beneficial.
According to an Aug. 25 report in ProPublica, Hegseth came into office betting that senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials said. SO he polled 11 top commanders to confirm his belief. Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.
Hegseth went ahead and gutted the program, called Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response or CHMR, anyway, reducing the number of personnel assigned to it from over 200 to around two dozen and the budget from $80 million to nearly nothing. The results have been stunning. The Pentagon recently admitted to have killed 153 civilians in Yemen during last year’s campaign against the Houthis. Estimates for the number of civilians killed in Iran by US/Israeli air strikes run on the order of 2,000-3,000, including the 168 killed in the Minab school massacre, most of whom were children.
Military commanders affirmed to ProPublica that the CHMR program worked. Leaders at U.S. Central Command told Hegseth’s top staff in a memo that CHMR “enhanced our precision and accuracy, making us more lethal.” The memo added, “The operational and strategic value of this work is widely recognized.” At the same time, the Joint Staff echoed the commanders’ sentiment. According to correspondence reviewed by ProPublica, the Joint Staff disagreed with the Army acting secretary–the only official, not named, who agreed with Hegseth–who said in a February 2025 memo that the program was redundant and recommended Congress repeal the law that set it in motion.
The backlash over civilian deaths resulting from Hegseth’s obsession with “maximum lethality” now appears to have the Defense Department backpedaling. In April, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, ProPublica continues, sent a follow-up memo about the civilian protection enterprise to Hegseth. This time, there was only one proposal on the table: reboot the program, albeit at reduced staff levels with 70 full-time people. In that memo, Colby argued that maintaining 35% of CHMR would address investigations into civilian harm, reports to Congress and payments to those harmed. The same commanders Hegseth polled earlier endorsed the move, several defense officials told ProPublica.
Military leaders steeped in lessons learned from the post-9/11 “forever wars” repeatedly have affirmed harm mitigation as an asset on the battlefield, ProPublica concludes. Civilian casualties undermine U.S. objectives and help boost insurgent recruiting, analysts say.
Every war that the U.S. has fought since Vietnam has in fact been a population war. No amount of “mitigation” is going to change that. The only guaranteed way of avoiding civilian harm is to abandon the geopolitics behind those wars, including Hegseth’s obsession with “maximum lethality,” and recognize every nation’s rights to sovereign development.
