From Promise to Peril: The U.S. Retreat From Civilian Harm Response

U.S. strikes on a school in Minab as part of its war on Iran, which killed more than 150 people, including 120 children, and on a migrant detention center in Yemen, which killed and injured dozens of civilians, underscore the continuing horrors of armed conflict. Since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has rapidly reversed progress on civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) procedures, failing to implement the Department of Defense’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) and the subsequent formal instruction, the 2023 Department of Defense Instruction 3000.17 (DOD-I). Both laid out steps to institutionalize and strengthen the U.S. military’s approach to preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm caused by its own operations. 

The conditions that prompted the U.S. to overhaul its approach to CHMR, including as a much-needed avenue for amends, have not disappeared. If anything, they have become more acute. Over two dozen Democratic senators have called on the Pentagon to publicize their investigation on the Minab strike so that there can be a “clear accounting ‌of what happened and a credible plan ​to prevent future failures.” Another group of senators raised concerns about Secretary Hegseth’s “abandonment of legally-mandated civilian protection efforts” at the Department. A recent bill to legislate responsible military use of AI includes a provision requiring a civilian harm mitigation and response office.

Yet the U.S. government remains recalcitrant. The current rollback is neither justified by operational necessity nor consistent with prevailing U.S. attitudes toward civilian protection or emerging allied approaches. It represents a dangerous retreat from the growing consensus that effective civilian harm response, including tracking and investigating civilian harm incidents and allegations, is integral to responsible and effective military operations. It is also inconsistent with the decades-long U.S. practice to provide—in some cases, in some form—amends for war-related damages. In this article, we briefly chart out the past progress by the U.S. on civilian harm response, and its current retreat, which risks repeating the mistakes of the past and squandering advancements based on hard-won lessons.

Fast and Furious Disruption of CHMR Progress 

Over the past 18 months, the U.S. has transformed from a flawed CHMR proponent to openly expressing its disdain for the laws of war. Rhetorically, this has included a shift from previous top officials recognizing the strategic value of minimizing civilian harm, while continuing to cause it, to today’s senior officials openly threatening war crimes (like “no quarter”) and denigrating rules as needless restraints. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has proposed in his “warrior ethos,” the U.S. military is now focused on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.” Similarly on amends to civilians harmed by war and long-standing international legal rules on repair, the Trump administration has shown little interest. Of the war in Iran, President Trump told the press, “to the victor belong the spoils.” 

The Trump administration’s disdain for CHMR goes beyond rhetoric. Yet the unraveling did not begin with Trump. Previous administrations’ callous disregard for mass civilian harm contributed. In late 2024, two highly respected civil society organizations pointed out that “the CHMR-AP’s security cooperation commitments on paper have stood in stark contrast to the [Department of Defense’s] actual practice … particularly regarding the US government’s virtually unconditional military support to the government of Israel in the face of catastrophic civilian harm using US weapons.” Devastating air campaigns and razing tactics, from Gaza to Lebanon, appear to have shifted the goal posts for what was deemed acceptable levels of civilian harm. 

In May 2026, the Office of the Department of Defense Inspector General published a report evaluating the implementation of the CHMR-AP between 2022 and 2025. The report found that the department did not fully implement any of the 11 objectives. By February 2025, the Pentagon had made progress on hiring CHMR personnel, creating CHMR institutions, and issuing department- and command-specific CHMR instructions and policies. Then the Trump administration gutted CHMR funding and personnel—some two-thirds by the end of fiscal year 2025 (from 40 personnel down to seven civilians and two military personnel). The inspector general report found the department may not be in compliance with its civilian casualties and harm policy, the 2023 DOD-I, a policy required by federal law. Its recommendations to address this were “unresolved.”

Evolution of CHMR as an Avenue for Amends

Many elements of CHMR are intimately tied to existing international legal obligations, including the obligations to take constant care to protect the civilian population, to take all feasible precautions, and to provide reparation when the laws of war are seriously violated.

It took repeated mass civilian casualty incidents to get to the 2022 CHMR-AP. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military developed practices to track and investigate civilian harm, but these practices were ad hoc and inconsistent. During the campaigns against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, as well as the U.S.  drone wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, journalists and human rights groups doggedly reported on the devastating gap between the military’s rhetoric and the civilian harm it continued to cause. 

The 2022 CHMR-AP was a watershed moment. For years, advocates within and outside the U.S. military sought to convince the Pentagon that preventing civilian harm before it occurred and responding to it adequately afterward was both a strategic necessity and a moral imperative. After deadly attacks in Syria and Afghanistan grabbed national attention, highlighting persistent failures to prevent foreseeable harm, to assess and learn from it, and to respond effectively, the Department of Defense adopted the CHMR-AP. The 2022 action plan declared that protecting civilians was “not only a moral imperative” but “critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield.” 

Civilian harm response, an integral component of CHMR, is related to, but distinct from, reparation, which involves legal responsibility for an internationally wrongful act. Reparation can be provided to a nation-state on behalf of wrongs done to its nationals or directly to the individuals. Historically, reparation comes after a conflict ends, if it comes at all. Human rights standards that the U.S. helped develop recommend that reparation should be adequate, effective, and prompt. 

When a military causes harm to civilians, regardless of the attack’s lawfulness, the CHMR community recommends the military respond to the harm by acknowledging it, apologizing, and providing amends—including as a conflict continues. In theory, CHMR does not displace international legal obligations to redress unlawful civilian harm, but provides an additional protective layer in cases of lawful civilian harm. In practice, where militaries rarely admit wrongdoing, barriers to accountability are often insurmountable, and the provision of reparation is rare to nonexistent, CHMR is often the only, not an additional, route. 

Even with CHMR processes in place for specific operations or combatant commands, the U.S. military acknowledged a vanishingly small number of cases of civilian harm. Even in the cases the military acknowledged, it could still refuse to apologize or provide amends. And even when the U.S. military provided amends, they were next to nothing compared to the harm done. Despite millions in congressionally appropriated funds, the Pentagon often reported making zero or minimal condolence payments—even in cases where it acknowledged harm. 

The 2022 CHMR-AP and 2023 DOD-I dedicated entire sections to response. In CHMR-AP Objective 8, the Department of Defense publicly committed to “improve its ability to consistently and appropriately acknowledge and respond to civilian harm” and treat harmed civilians “with dignity and respect.” The DOD-I established an “overarching institutional framework” for response, taking up the CHMR-AP mandate to develop a “diverse menu of response options” that would allow commanders to “craft tailored responses, based on consultations with affected individuals and communities.” These included providing acknowledgments, condolence payments, medical care, repairs to damaged infrastructure, ordnance removal, and commemorations. 

According to the DOD-I, responses should be “tailored based on consultations with affected individuals and communities,” if appropriate and practicable. This is in line with civil society findings that responses, whether individual or community-based, that do not align with the actual needs of those harmed risk eroding their symbolic significance and undermining, rather than strengthening, trust. The DOD-I also promotes consistency in how the U.S. military approaches civilian harm assessments, mandating the public release of information on civilian harm on a quarterly basis, and adopting the “more likely than not” standard.

These public policy commitments were wins for advocates who had been highlighting the importance of—and many barriers to—civilians seeking redress. Of particular note was a shift in the department’s understanding of the purpose of response. According to the CHMR-AP and the DOD-I, the fundamental purpose of acknowledgment and response included “expressing condolences” and “helping to address the direct impacts experienced.” This was a significant shift from preexisting policy on compensation, which limited condolence payments to “friendly” civilians and framed the purpose in terms of countering terror and countering insurgency.

There was more to be done, but the fast and furious disruption to CHMR provoked a real sense of whiplash, coming just as efforts had created a real sense of momentum after two decades of slow and arduous progress. 

Conditions That Prompted CHMR-AP Are Still Present

All the conditions that prompted the adoption of the CHMR-AP are still present. Most obviously: The U.S. military continues to cause egregious civilian harm, which continues to provoke public outcry, undermining U.S. strategic interests and moral standing at home and abroad. 

In both the Iran and Yemen attacks, people immediately began to wonder how the U.S. military could have gotten it so wrong. The U.S. military had reason to know the sites they were hitting would be filled with civilians, and thus any attack would result in massive civilian harm. The U.S. had spent years training the Saudi-led coalition how to mitigate civilian harm in Yemen. A few years prior, that coalition bombed the same detention complex using a U.S. weapon. At the time, the strike caused outrage and provoked hand-wringing about U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Now it was the U.S. carrying out the attack. In Iran, people speculated the U.S. was relying on old intelligence, or artificial intelligence (AI). In any case, more than 100 school children were dead. Sources told CNN that CHMR teams at U.S. Central Command and other combatant commands being “short-staffed” was likely a contributing factor.

The U.S. military is clearly not equipped to respond to these cases of civilian harm. More than a year after the Yemen attack, the U.S. military has yet to release the results of promised civilian harm assessments. More than five months after the Iran attack, the U.S. military had failed to release its investigation results, despite Congress grilling Hegseth and proposing to limit his travel budget until answers were received. In neither case is there any clarity as to whether civilian harm will be acknowledged, let alone amends provided to those harmed.

Allies Are Increasing Transparency and Strengthening Civilian Harm Response

By consolidating lessons learned over two decades of military engagements, culminating in the publication of the CHMR-AP, the U.S. spearheaded the development of CHMR, setting a direction that many allies and partners embraced. At the height of CHMR-AP implementation, the U.S. was slowly moving toward its objective to integrate CHMR as a component and a condition of security cooperation. Today, those roles have reversed. Allies increasingly find themselves navigating partnership with a U.S. whose current posture is at odds with their continued recognition of the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to mitigate and respond to civilian harm.

Since 2021, the Dutch defense ministry has been engaged in a collaborative “roadmap process” with a consortium of academic experts and civil society organizations to strengthen policy and practice on understanding, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm. Recently announced reforms in the Netherlands, for example, include direct apologies, avenues for reporting harm, an intent to work with allies to develop a list of CHMR topics to discuss before future coalition operations, and public reporting of civilian harm assessments on a rolling and annual basis. In 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence disclosed that, following an internal investigation, it offered a formal apology and financial compensation to victims of a Dutch airstrike on a university building in Mosul, Iraq, a decade earlier. This deliberate shift toward greater transparency, accountability, and operational learning has resulted in the Netherlands being recognized by the Civilian Protection Monitor as an “emerging leader.”

In the United Kingdom, civil society organizations have consistently identified the U.K.’s fragmented response to civilian harm as a critical weakness. In 2024, the U.K. Ministry of Defence commissioned a review of its human security policy and CHMR capabilities. The review included consultations with defense personnel and civil society. In April 2026, the ministry shared a summary report of the review with the organizations Ceasefire and Airwars, which have worked for many years to advance transparency and accountability for alleged civilian harm caused by U.K. armed forces. The summary concludes, “Investment into tracking, investigation, transparency, and post-harm response capabilities could mitigate possible areas of vulnerability, particularly in high-intensity warfighting contexts.” Meanwhile the U.K. awarded 32 million pounds in compensation across more than 6,600 cases of civilian harm in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the summary report recommends refreshing legacy mechanisms for amends and post-harm response.

Beyond NATO militaries, members of the Saudi-led coalition adopted CHMR approaches in Yemen. In mid-2025, the Nigerian Air Force announced its own CHMR-AP and subsequently inaugurated a CHMR Board. And in April 2026, Somalia formally established a comprehensive framework to prevent, mitigate, and respond to civilian harm under a new national policy. The current U.S. rollback therefore represents more than a domestic policy reversal. It marks a departure from an emerging international consensus that effective civilian harm response is integral to responsible and effective military conduct, as well as from the much longer-established practice of making reparations for damages caused during armed conflict.

Repairing Civilian Harm Is Not Without Precedent 

The United States’ stalled and, thus far, inadequate response to mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen and Iran reflects the current lack of robust institutional systems, procedures, and resources for civilian harm redress. Far from being unprecedented, these incidents bear striking parallels to past military incidents that caused significant civilian harm, which resulted in the payment of substantial compensation to some of the victims’ families.

The combination of moving fast with new technology without sufficient CHMR has seen disastrous results in the past, for which the U.S. later had to compensate—for example, following the downing of Iranian Airbus 655 by the U.S. Navy in 1988, which killed all 290 people on board, including 66 children. The U.S. claimed its Aegis-equipped guided-missile cruiser (USS Vincennes) mistakenly shot down the civilian passenger flight over the Persian Gulf. The Aegis was a new anti-air defense system that was being used for the first time. The system could simultaneously track and engage more than 200 aircraft and missiles within a 300-mile radius and could operate in fully automated mode.

The catastrophe, a result of human errors combined with system misidentification, stands as “a cautionary tale of the limits of human-machine teaming in combat environments.” After eight years of litigation with Iran, a settlement was reached at the International Court of Justice, in which the U.S. agreed to pay $61.8 million (approximately $127 million today) to the victims’ families. 

This is not an isolated example. The U.S. has made offers to other nations for military mistakes—including a U.S. submarine sinking, during World War II, the Japanese MV Awa Maru, which was marked with a red cross, killing over 2,000 people; the U.S. Air Force bombing Vatican City in 1943; and the U.S. Air Force bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 during the Kosovo campaign, which the U.S. maintains was caused by using out-of-date maps.

Although decades old, these examples demonstrate that acknowledging civilian harm and providing compensation—even without a formal admission of liability—is not foreign to U.S. practice. Rather, they underscore a long-standing recognition that civilian casualty incidents demand a meaningful institutional response.

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Despite the Trump administration gutting the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, scrapping its civilian harm database, and replacing human analysts with AI assessments, all is not lost. The CHMR policy stands, as do the congressionally mandated requirements related to reporting and the Center of Excellence. Multiple prominent voices, including senior military officials and veterans, have come out in support of CHMR, emphasizing its moral, strategic, and operational value. 

At a time when civilian rights and protections afforded under international human rights law and international humanitarian law are under immense pressure, dismantling the framework for promptly and adequately responding to civilian harm is unlikely to make U.S. military operations more effective. Instead, it risks leaving civilians who have suffered harm without access to any possibility of amends, reducing the military’s ability to learn from past operations and mitigate future harm, and causing significant reputational damage. The course correction recommended by the Pentagon’s inspector general should therefore be treated as an urgent priority.

More broadly, people have organized across the country to protest abuses by the U.S. military and its allies and to demand far more than what CHMR offers—real justice and redress. This matters. So long as the U.S. engages in wars abroad and has leverage over others through military support, its level of care or disdain for civilians, as expressed in its policies and practices, as well as its level of care or disdain for the requirements set by international law, will play an outsized role in influencing how horrible conflicts become.