Images from a missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any case studies Wes J. Bryant had reviewed while trying to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through rubble. Iranian health officials said the attack on an elementary school in Minab killed more than 165 people, most under age 12, and wounded nearly 100. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves became a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, an Air Force combat veteran and former special operations targeting specialist, had been a senior adviser in a new Defense Department program designed to reduce civilian harm. He worked at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, reporting to a veteran targeter who had once served as a U.N. war-crimes investigator. By the time the Minab strike shocked the world, that momentum had been reversed: Bryant was forced out in cuts last spring, the civilian protection mission was effectively dissolved, and the Pentagon’s priorities were refocused on “lethality” under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several outlets concluded the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. The president denied U.S. responsibility without offering evidence; independent researchers, including Bellingcat, authenticated video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school and identified Tomahawk fragments at the site. The U.N. and human-rights experts have called for investigations into whether the attack violated international law. The U.S. Department of Defense and the White House did not comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions, successive administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense leaders periodically tried to reduce harm to noncombatants, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when a Biden-era strategy formalized Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR). The program—set out in an action plan and Defense Department instruction—created roughly 200 personnel devoted to the mission, including about 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence near the Pentagon.
CHMR called for deeper pre-strike planning (real-time mapping of civilian presence, risk analysis) and post-strike assessments or investigations to learn what went wrong and adapt training. By 2024, teams were embedded with major commands, including Central Command, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Africa Command. Several Trump administration defense nominees publicly expressed support for CHMR during confirmation hearings.
But once in office, the Trump administration’s reorganization of national security—centered on higher tolerance for lethal force and less emphasis on legal and procedural guardrails—undermined the effort. Officials allege the administration lowered authorization thresholds for strikes, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments, and dismissed key oversight figures, including inspectors general.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission was eliminated, former staff say. At Central Command a 10-person team was cut to one adviser; other commands lost most of their CHMR personnel. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence remains on paper but lacks mission, mandate, or budget, according to former staffers.
The personnel cuts coincided with a spike in strikes. Conflict monitors report that the number of lethal U.S. operations in the year after Trump returned to office exceeded totals from the four years of the previous administration. Human-rights monitors say U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, with hundreds more under review amid Iran’s communications blackout and dangerous conditions. Other recent strikes in Yemen and Somalia have also raised alarm.
Former and current defense officials argue CHMR could have reduced such civilian harm. They point to the operational and strategic costs of killing noncombatants: civilian casualties fuel militant recruitment and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired General Stanley McChrystal’s “insurgent math”—that every innocent killed creates more enemies—remains a guiding concern.
The track record of mistakes is sobering. In 2015, a U.S. gunship attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing patients and staff; a military investigation found human and systems errors. High civilian tolls during campaigns against ISIS, including strikes that hit a mosque, a school, and caused a building collapse in Mosul, prompted critiques that the military lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground and too often waved off civilian-harm reports.
CHMR was born partly from these failures. After a 2021 Kabul strike killed an aid worker and nine relatives—including seven children—then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pushed for immediate reforms. The 2022 CHMR action plan and the 2023 Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, led by a RAND report author, aimed to institutionalize harm prevention: embedding advisers in commands, conducting lookbacks and training, maintaining detailed “no-strike” lists for protected sites, and improving compensation and communications after mistakes.
Some commanders embraced the program. Bryant described Adm. Frank Bradley, then head of JSOC, as “incredibly supportive,” ordering comprehensive lookbacks and integrating lessons into operations. But critics warned that extra oversight could hamper operational flexibility, and some commanders resisted cultural shifts that required acknowledging civilian harm.
The reforms unraveled under Hegseth’s “lethality” doctrine. The former Fox News host and Army National Guard infantry officer has publicly disparaged judge advocate generals (JAGs) and other legal constraints as roadblocks to the “warrior ethos.” Shortly after taking office he fired the military’s top JAGs. CHMR advisers say they tried to rebrand their work to appeal to the new leadership but were largely unable to stop the attrition.
Bryant says speaking out against the cuts cost him his job. He was placed on leave after criticizing the administration in national outlets and resigned in September. He’s since become a vocal critic of policies he says erode military professionalism and legality.
The shift has coincided with contentious operations. Critics cite a “double-tap” attack on an alleged drug boat—reported to have killed survivors in a follow-up strike—and a U.S. airstrike on a migrant detention center in Yemen that Amnesty International says should be investigated as a war crime. In Somalia, strikes increased and civilian casualties reportedly rose; villagers said one strike killed Omar Abdullahi, a respected clan mediator nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker.”
Former CHMR personnel say an intact harm-prevention framework could have altered the Iran campaign’s planning months in advance. CHMR teams would have mapped civilian infrastructure and movement, updated and enforced no-strike lists, and conducted rigorous pre-strike risk analysis. If a disaster occurred, they would have pushed for transparent public statements and immediate inquiries. One critical question is whether the Minab school was on the no-strike list; the school sits yards from an IRG naval base and was formerly part of that base, though maps have marked it as a school since at least 2013.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk—they’re part of a system,” a former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
Bryant and other former staffers warn that dismantling CHMR has real-world consequences. They say the U.S. is reverting to practices that produced the high civilian tolls of earlier conflicts and that the current approach—prioritizing lethality over mitigation and transparency—risks repeating those failures.
If U.S. responsibility for the Minab strike is confirmed, Bryant said, it could stand as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian-harm mitigation in modern U.S. history. The loss of a dedicated civilian-protection mission, he and others argue, has left the military less able to prevent such tragedies and less prepared to respond when they occur.
Hannah Allam reported this article for ProPublica; Kirsten Berg contributed research. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
