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Self-styled War Secretary<\/span> Pete Hegseth\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The War Department\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school\u00a0in Minab, Iran, in February that killed more than 150 people, most of them children<\/a>.<\/p>\n Wes Bryant, who served as the Center\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before civilian harm mitigation and response (CMHR) efforts were sidelined and the staff downsized last year, the Center completed basic civilian harm mitigation training for 212 personnel from military combatant commands like Central Command and Africa Command, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies, according to the report.<\/p>\n Established<\/a> in 2023, the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence\u00a0was just \u201chitting its stride\u201d in late 2024, a defense official told The Intercept. When the center was staffed by 40 civilians, troops, and contractors at the beginning of last year, it was on track \u201cto achieve Full Operational Capability\u201d by the end of 2025, according to the report. That never came to fruition, as the Center saw its staff slashed to seven civilians and two members of the military.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe COE was cut down shortly after becoming fully operational,\u201d Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager at Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. \u201cThey had minimal time to show value, but they were still able to inject critical CHMR expertise to all corners of the U.S. military, even as their staff dwindled down to a handful of people.\u201d<\/p>\n The report also details financial constraints that have crippled the entire civilian harm mitigation and response enterprise across the War Department. \u201cDoW-wide budgets for CHMR in FY26 were cut,\u201d reads the report which notes that staff and programs across the entire Department of War \u2014 including at combatant commands like AFRICOM and CENTCOM \u2014 \u201cwere gradually reorganized, reduced, and\/or terminated by the end of FY25.\u201d<\/p>\n The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM, for example, has been reduced to just one individual, according <\/a>to Adm. Brad Cooper, the command\u2019s chief. Reporting by The Intercept<\/a> also found U.S. Southern Command\u00a0was unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports after the U.S.\u00a0attacked Venezuela<\/a>\u00a0in January. When the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, they learned the command had no mechanism for dealing with such reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.<\/p>\n While the Pentagon slashed the center\u2019s staff, the military has made greater efforts to utilize artificial intelligence for targeting and civilian harm mitigation, according to the report. It specifically references the Maven Smart System, a product of the defense firm Palantir<\/a> that serves as the War Department\u2019s signature AI-enabled software platform. The Center of Excellence \u201cleveraged the rapid adoption of the AI-enabled Maven Smart System (MSS)\u201d within the military to advance the development of a tool to give field commands a more complete picture of the civilian environment, the report notes.\u00a0A current defense official said it provided a \u201cbetter layer of protection\u201d for civilians in war zones.\u00a0<\/p>\n During an Army training exercise, the AI assistant reportedly shortened the timeline to produce civilian assessments by 97 percent.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The report also details the Center\u2019s development of \u201can AI Assistant prototype that helps military staff rapidly analyze civilian environment data during operations by equipping AskSage, the Army\u2019s enterprise AI platform,\u201d with the CHMR data. During an Army training exercise, the AI assistant reportedly shortened the timeline to produce civilian assessments by 97 percent. Several additional Army units have requested access to the assistant, according to the report.<\/p>\n The report also references a database used for tracking civilian harm that the Pentagon abandoned last year. It notes that \u201cprogress on the development of a standardized CHMR data management process and a repository of civilian harm information stalled due to the cessation of the CHMR Data Management Platform (DMP) project during Department-wide realignment of priorities and resources.\u201d<\/p>\n Without a database like the DMP, the Pentagon is unable to effectively track civilian harm. In May, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools and was aware of just \u201cone active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions.\u201d\u00a0Months later, CENTCOM still has no additional information about civilian harm, telling The Intercept: \u201cWe have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury.\u201d Airwars, by contrast, has chronicled hundreds of civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.<\/p>\n\n