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 more than 200 to around two dozen and the budget from $80 million to nearly nothing. The results have been stunning. The Pentagon recently admitted to having killed 153 civilians in Yemen during last year’s campaign against the Houthis. Estimates for the number of civilians killed in Iran by U.S./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 that Congress repeal the law that set it in motion.
