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 train
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