Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving to terminate Pentagon offices and positions that focus on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations, according to three defense officials.
Employees at the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which deals with policy matters related to limiting the risk to noncombatants across the armed forces, were informed on Monday that their office would be closed, the officials said. They were also told that the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which handles training and procedures, would close as well.
The Pentagon is likely to cut all positions at combatant commands around the world, like Central Command and Africa Command, that work to mitigate and assess risks to civilians during airstrikes and other military operations.
It is unclear whether Mr. Hegseth is rescinding the Pentagon’s policy instruction, which requires that possible risks to civilians are considered in combat planning and operations.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy changes.
If enforced, the decision would eliminate jobs for more than 160 Defense Department employees.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense referred questions about Mr. Hegseth’s decision to close these programs to the Army, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding those developments on Tuesday.
In President Trump’s first week back in office, the Army asked Pentagon leadership to rescind the policy instruction, relieve the service of its responsibility for the Center of Excellence and to ask Congress to abolish the office.
The laws of armed conflict require the protection of civilians in war zones, and senior commanders draft rules of engagement for their forces to comply with them.
Long considered a bedrock of U.S. military culture, those principles are now under threat in the second Trump administration, as Mr. Hegseth repeatedly speaks about wanting to return “warfighting” and a “warrior ethos” to a military he insists has become soft and too bureaucratic.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Hegseth answered questions about his past comments, including that “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a uniformed attorney known as a Judge Advocate General, or JAG, had made it more difficult to defeat enemies, as well as his use of the term “jagoff” to derisively refer to those officers.
Such rules of engagement, which establish guidelines for the use of deadly force in a military operation, are in fact signed by the senior officer in a given combat theater, not by JAG officers.
In a leadership purge at the Pentagon on Feb. 21, Mr. Hegseth fired the top uniformed lawyers for the Army and Air Force. The Navy’s top JAG, a three-star admiral, abruptly retired in December. His deputy, a two-star admiral, remains in place as the acting Navy JAG.
In a post on LinkedIn late Monday night, Matt Isler, a retired Air Force brigadier general who oversaw the combination of aerial surveillance, coalition air power and ground-based weapons in support of ground troops battling Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, pushed back on the new Pentagon leadership’s decision.
“Some have recently argued that Defense Department efforts to mitigate civilian deaths in war inappropriately constrain U.S. forces,” he wrote. “This could not be farther from the truth.”
“Reducing risks of civilian harm focuses combat effects on the enemy, accelerates achievement of campaign objectives, preserves combat power, and protects warfighters,” he added.
Mr. Hegseth’s decision was heavily criticized by civilian harm protection advocates with whom the military worked in close consultation to develop policies.
“Repeal of these lifesaving policies would be a betrayal of the civilians who have borne the brunt of U.S. operations,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “It would also be a betrayal of the war fighters and veterans Secretary Hegseth says he stands for, who have themselves worked to ensure the U.S. can learn from the grave mistakes and lessons of past wars.”
Eliminating these programs could also halt efforts to provide redress and payments to civilian victims of U.S. combat operations.
Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a human rights lawyer representing 30 families whose loved ones were injured or killed in U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan between 2015 and 2024, said that eliminating these programs would exacerbate the trauma of civilian victims and moral injury among soldiers involved in the incidents.
Ms. Naples-Mitchell, whose clients include the relatives of victims who were the subject of New York Times reporting, said the changes would make the government less efficient.
“Killing innocent people is not only a moral stain,” she said, “but wastes government resources and makes Americans less safe.”
The Defense Department’s civilian protection program was started during the first Trump administration by James N. Mattis, the secretary of defense at the time, in response to a Times report in November 2017 on civilians who were killed during airstrikes in Iraq.
In 2022, after a series of Times investigations that uncovered systemic failures to protect civilians, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced sweeping changes to military doctrine, planning and training aimed at mitigating the risk of civilian harm.
While these programs were heralded as making improvements to U.S. civilian harm policies, they faced criticism for not addressing operations the United States supports through military aid alone, such as Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
The Trump administration also recently rescinded Biden-era limits on counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, reverting to the looser set of rules the president used in his first term.
Since Mr. Trump took office, the U.S. military has launched several strikes in Iraq, Syria and Somalia, despite his earlier promises to end “endless wars.”
The most recent of those actions targeted Al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia on Saturday, according to a statement released by U.S. Africa Command.
On Feb. 23, U.S. forces launched an attack in northwest Syria that killed the senior leader of a terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda, according to U.S. Central Command, which later released a video of the strike.
On Feb. 12, five ISIS fighters in Iraq were killed in an airstrike enabled by U.S. forces in the country, Central Command said in a statement days later.
