Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments

Pentagon Reduces Civilian Protection Center Staff and Ends Data Platform Project

The Department of Defense’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to nine by the end of that year, according to an internal report shared with The Intercept. Two current defense officials confirmed that staffing levels have remained at nine. The center, established in 2023, had been scheduled to reach full operational capability by the end of 2025 when it employed 40 civilians, service members, and contractors.

Current and former officials stated that the reductions have limited the center’s capacity to conduct assessments of civilian harm. The remaining staff members have not been assigned to review certain incidents, including a February U.S. strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

Wes Bryant, who served as the center’s chief of civilian harm assessments until he left the position in 2025, said the center continues limited operations. “The department retained a portion of the program to demonstrate compliance with statutory requirements, but the center has had limited influence on operations or oversight,” Bryant told The Intercept. He added that remaining personnel continue to produce work that is not incorporated into operational planning.

Prior to the staffing reductions, the center completed civilian harm mitigation and response training for 212 personnel drawn from combatant commands, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies. A defense official described the center as “hitting its stride” in late 2024. Madison Hunke, U.S. program manager at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, stated that the center had begun delivering expertise across the military before the reductions took effect.

Department-wide budgets for civilian harm mitigation and response activities were reduced for fiscal year 2026. The report states that staff and programs at combatant commands, including U.S. Central Command and U.S. Africa Command, were reorganized, reduced, or ended by the close of fiscal year 2025. The civilian harm mitigation team at U.S. Central Command was reduced from ten personnel to one, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the command’s leader. U.S. Southern Command lacked an established process for receiving civilian casualty reports after operations in Venezuela in January, according to Airwars, a U.K.-based monitoring group. Airwars was directed to submit materials to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

The report describes increased use of artificial intelligence tools for targeting and civilian harm analysis. The department has expanded adoption of the Maven Smart System, an AI-enabled platform developed by Palantir. The center incorporated data from this system into a prototype AI assistant built on the Army’s AskSage platform. During an Army training exercise, the assistant reduced the time required to produce civilian environment assessments by 97 percent. Additional Army units have requested access to the tool.

Development of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Data Management Platform was halted during the realignment of priorities and resources. Without a centralized repository, the department lacks a standardized method for tracking civilian harm incidents. In May, Cooper stated that U.S. Central Command had identified only one active civilian casualty investigation among 13,629 munitions expended. As of later reporting, the command had no further updates on investigations related to Operation Epic Fury. Airwars has documented hundreds of civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of operations.

The World Health Organization reported 3,375 deaths in Iran prior to the most recent pause in hostilities. U.S. forces conducted more than 220 boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Airwars recorded at least 224 civilian deaths in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider, a campaign of air and naval strikes against Houthi targets in spring 2025. This figure nearly doubled the cumulative civilian toll attributed to U.S. operations in Yemen since 2002.

The center completed a classified qualitative lessons-learned study on Operation Rough Rider that examined how operational conditions affected civilian harm mitigation. Bryant described the center’s contribution to the study as limited, and a current defense official stated that the center was excluded from direct examination of strikes conducted during the operation.

The Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on the study or for interviews with officials at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, or the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The “Annual Report on the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for Fiscal Year 2025,” dated April 4, 2026, states that it will be posted on a department website but has not yet been released. On July 18, 2026, the secretary’s office stated that the report is expected to be issued in summer 2026.

In a letter sent earlier in July, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and nine other Democratic members of Congress wrote that reductions in civilian harm mitigation and response programs have left the department unable to meet statutory requirements. The letter cited a May inspector general report that characterized civilian protection efforts as largely inactive.

Hunke stated that the center requires sustained resources to fulfill its mandate during ongoing operations in Iran. A defense official said that even a fully staffed center would have faced constraints on its role. Bryant, who left the department after raising concerns about the reductions, described the remaining mission as focused on formal compliance. A current defense official agreed with that characterization.

Multiple independent news organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, reported the same March 2025 reductions in center staffing from approximately 200 positions to fewer than 40. The numerical claims in the internal report align with those accounts.