Pete Hegseth dismantled the Pentagon's civilian protection unit, slashed its staff by 77 percent, and scrapped the database used to track civilian deaths in war zones. Then, in February, the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran and killed more than 150 people, most of them children. These two facts are not unrelated.
From 40 People to 9, and Then the Bombs Dropped
The Intercept is reporting that the War Department's Civilian Protection Center of Excellence has been gutted to a skeleton crew of nine people, down from a staff of 40 when Trump took office in January 2025. Two current defense officials confirmed those staffing numbers are still accurate today. The center was established in 2023 and, by late 2024, was just hitting its stride.
When it had a full staff, the center was on track to reach Full Operational Capability by the end of 2025. Instead, Hegseth's Pentagon reduced it to seven civilians and two military personnel. Madison Hunke, U.S. program manager at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept the center was "cut down shortly after becoming fully operational."
Before it was gutted, the center completed civilian harm mitigation training for 212 personnel across military combatant commands, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies. All of that institutional momentum, built over two years, is now essentially gone.
The School Attack They Are Not Allowed to Investigate
On February, the U.S. struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. More than 150 people died, most of them children. The remaining staff at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence are reportedly barred from investigating it.
Let that land. The unit specifically designed to assess major civilian casualty incidents is being blocked from assessing one of the worst civilian casualty incidents in recent American military history. Wes Bryant, the center's former chief of civilian harm assessments and one of the more than 30 people pushed out last year, told The Intercept exactly what that means in practice.
"The Hegseth regime held on to a thread of the program mostly in effort to be able to say they are following the law," Bryant said, "but the reality is the Center and its efforts have had little to no influence on or oversight or visibility on operations." He added that most of the remaining work "is being thrown into the wind, and neither institutionalized nor operationalized." Keeping nine people in chairs so you can claim the program still exists is not civilian protection. It is theater with a body count.
They Killed the Database Too
The Pentagon also quietly abandoned the CHMR Data Management Platform, a database used to track civilian harm across war zones. The Intercept reports the project was scrapped during what the Pentagon euphemistically called a "department-wide realignment of priorities and resources."
The consequences of that decision are not abstract. In May, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told Congress the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools, and was aware of just one active civilian casualty investigation out of 13,629 munitions fired. By the time The Intercept filed its report, CENTCOM still had no additional information. Thousands of bombs, one investigation, zero database.
The civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM itself has also been gutted. What was a 10-person team is now a single individual, according to Cooper's own testimony. One person tracking civilian casualties across the entire Central Command theater.
When Venezuela Got Hit, No One Was Even Answering the Phone
The Intercept's reporting extends beyond Iran. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January, U.S. Southern Command was reportedly so overwhelmed by the volume of civilian casualty reports that it had no mechanism to process them at all. When the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars tried to submit casualty documentation to SOUTHCOM, the command simply had no system for accepting it.
Airwars then reached out to the Pentagon directly. The Pentagon told them to submit their documentation to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. The same center that, by this point, had been reduced to nine people, stripped of investigative authority, and had its database cancelled. Good luck with that.
This is what it looks like when accountability infrastructure is deliberately destroyed. Not one catastrophic failure. A cascading series of closed doors, where every agency points to another agency and the documentation of dead civilians ends up nowhere.
Don't Worry, They Have a Chatbot Now
While all of this was happening, the Pentagon was putting considerable energy into AI. The Intercept reports the War Department leaned into Palantir's Maven Smart System as its signature AI-enabled platform, and the Center of Excellence developed an "AI Assistant prototype" built on AskSage, the Army's enterprise AI platform, designed to help military staff rapidly analyze civilian environment data during operations.
During one Army training exercise, the AI assistant reportedly shortened the timeline to produce civilian assessments by 97 percent. Several Army units have since requested access. A current defense official called it a "better layer of protection" for civilians in war zones.
To be very clear about what is happening here: the humans who spent years building expertise in civilian harm mitigation were fired, their database was cancelled, and their investigative authority was stripped. In their place, the Pentagon is deploying an AI chatbot. The school in Minab had 150 people in it when the bombs hit. We are being asked to believe the chatbot is an upgrade.
The Dingo Take
There is a version of this story where you could argue the cuts were just bureaucratic incompetence, budget pressure, the usual grinding indifference of a large institution. That version becomes impossible to defend the moment you learn that the remaining staff are specifically blocked from investigating the strike on an elementary school that killed more than 150 children. That is not neglect. That is a choice.
Hegseth has spent the better part of two years cosplaying as a wartime tough guy while systematically dismantling every internal mechanism the Pentagon had for asking whether the bombs it drops are landing on the right people. The civilian harm database: gone. The 10-person CENTCOM team: one guy. The 40-person center: nine people in chairs who aren't allowed to investigate anything that matters. What remains is a Potemkin accountability structure, kept barely alive so no one can technically say it doesn't exist.
Bryant, the man who actually ran this program, said the quiet part out loud: Hegseth kept a thread of it alive to claim legal compliance while ensuring it had no real power. That is corruption with extra steps. The dead children at Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school are not a tragedy that happened despite the system. They are what the system, as currently designed, permits.
