Photographs from a missile strike in southern Iran showed scenes more harrowing than any case study Wes J. Bryant had reviewed while working to overhaul how the U.S. military protects civilians. Parents wept over children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-streaked backpacks protruded from rubble. Iranian officials said the strike on an elementary school in Minab killed more than 165 people, most under age 12, and wounded nearly 100. Images of small coffins and rows of fresh graves became an emblem of the opening day of the wider U.S.-Israeli campaign in Iran.
Bryant, an Air Force combat veteran and former special-operations targeting specialist, had been a senior adviser in a new Defense Department initiative created to reduce civilian harm. He worked at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and reported 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 program’s momentum had been reversed: Bryant was pushed out in cuts last spring, the civilian-protection mission was largely dissolved, and the Pentagon refocused priorities on “lethality” under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Open-source investigators and several news outlets concluded the strike in Minab was likely carried out by the United States. The president denied responsibility without offering evidence; independent researchers, including Bellingcat, authenticated video of a Tomahawk missile impact near the school and identified missile fragments at the site. The U.N. and human-rights experts have called for inquiries into whether the attack violated international law. The U.S. Department of Defense and the White House declined to comment.
Efforts to reduce civilian casualties are not new. Since the post-9/11 wars, U.S. forces have repeatedly faced controversy over strikes that killed noncombatants. Defense leaders periodically tried to limit harm, but there was no standard, institutional framework until 2022, when the Biden administration formalized a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) strategy. The action plan and department instruction created roughly 200 personnel devoted to the mission, including about 30 assigned to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence near the Pentagon.
CHMR required deeper pre-strike planning—real-time mapping of civilian presence, formal risk analysis—and post-strike assessments or investigations to learn from mistakes and adapt training. By 2024, advisers were embedded with major commands, including Central Command, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Africa Command. Several Trump-era defense nominees had publicly expressed support for CHMR during confirmation hearings.
Once the new administration took office, however, its reorganization of national security emphasized higher tolerance for lethal force and reduced legal and procedural guardrails. Officials say authorization thresholds for strikes were lowered, target categories expanded, threat assessments were amplified, and key oversight figures were dismissed. Around 90% of the CHMR mission was eliminated, former staffers say: Central Command’s 10-person team was cut to one adviser, other commands lost most CHMR personnel, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence exists on paper but lacks a clear mission, mandate, or budget.
Those personnel cuts coincided with a dramatic rise in strikes. Conflict monitors report that the number of lethal U.S. operations in the year after the Trump administration returned to power exceeded the totals from the previous four-year period. Human-rights groups say U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, with additional casualties still under review amid communications blackouts and unsafe conditions. Separate worrying incidents in Yemen and Somalia have also been linked to increased U.S. strike activity.
Former and current defense officials argue the CHMR framework could have reduced such harms. They emphasize the operational and strategic costs of civilian casualties: they fuel militant recruitment, undermine local cooperation, and complicate intelligence gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s cautionary “insurgent math”—that each innocent killed can create more enemies—remains a touchstone for commanders who weigh civilian risk.
The military’s past mistakes illustrate the stakes. In 2015, a U.S. gunship attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing patients and staff; a military probe found human and systemic errors. High civilian tolls in campaigns against ISIS—strikes that hit a mosque, a school, and caused a building collapse in Mosul—prompted critiques that forces lacked a full picture of conditions on the ground and too often dismissed reports of civilian harm. After a 2021 Kabul strike killed an aid worker and nine relatives, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pushed for reforms that led to CHMR’s 2022 action plan and the 2023 creation of the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.
The reforms 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 post-incident communications. Some commanders embraced the changes. Bryant described Adm. Frank Bradley, then head of JSOC, as deeply supportive—ordering comprehensive lookbacks and integrating lessons into operations. Yet other leaders resisted, warning that extra oversight could constrain operational flexibility.
The Biden-era reforms began to unravel under Hegseth’s “lethality” doctrine. The former cable-news host and Army National Guard infantry officer has publicly criticized judge advocate generals and other legal constraints as impediments to the “warrior ethos.” Shortly after taking office he removed the service’s top military lawyers. CHMR advisers say they tried to rebrand and pitch their work to the new leadership but were largely unable to prevent widespread attrition.
Bryant says speaking out about the cuts cost him his job. Placed on leave after criticizing the administration in national outlets, he resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of policies he says erode military professionalism and the rule of law.
The operational consequences are already contested. Critics point to a reported “double-tap” strike on an alleged drug boat that may have killed survivors in a follow-up attack, a U.S. airstrike on a migrant detention center in Yemen Amnesty International says warrants a war-crimes inquiry, and stepped-up strikes in Somalia that villagers say have killed civilians including local mediators.
Former CHMR staffers say an intact harm-prevention framework could have changed how the Iran campaign was planned months earlier: teams would have mapped civilian infrastructure and movement, maintained and enforced no‑strike lists, conducted rigorous pre‑strike risk analyses, and pushed for rapid, transparent inquiries and public statements if a catastrophe occurred. A central question in Minab is whether the school—sited yards from an IRG naval base and reportedly once part of that base but marked on maps as a school since at least 2013—was on any no-strike list.
“Whoever presses the button on a Tomahawk is part of a system,” a former adviser said. “You want that person to be confident they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
Bryant and other former advisers warn that dismantling CHMR risks returning the military to practices that produced high civilian tolls in earlier conflicts. They argue prioritizing lethality over mitigation, oversight, and transparency increases the chance of repeating those failures. If U.S. responsibility for the Minab strike is confirmed, they say, it could stand as one of the most serious targeting and civilian-protection failures in recent U.S. history.
Hannah Allam reported this article for ProPublica; Kirsten Berg contributed research. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
