People inspect a destroyed house following an operation by the U.S. military in the Syrian village of Atmeh, in Idlib province, Syria, on Feb. 3, 2022. (Ghaith Alsayed/AP)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Conner Huey was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he received a Master of Science in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He is a Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, headquartered at Loyola University Chicago.
Eighteen months ago, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gutted the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, the initiative charged with keeping American bombs from landing on people who were never the target, overriding the unanimous objection of the nation’s top commanders. Originally staffed by nearly 200 personnel, CHMR shrank to approximately two dozen, while U.S. Central Command, which would soon oversee the Iran war, was left with a single person.
The results arrived quickly. The 2025 air campaign in Yemen killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 more, including two of the deadliest strikes on civilians the Pentagon has acknowledged in recent years. In the opening hours of the Iran war, an American airstrike hit a primary school in Minab, killing more than 100 children. Early findings from the still-unreleased investigation suggest outdated intelligence, precisely the type of error that civilian-harm specialists, who study patterns of life around a target before a strike, exist to identify.
Hegseth’s rationale was that programs like CHMR make America soft, arguing that restrictions on the warfighter undermine “maximum lethality.” The moral response to this claim has been made many times by philosophers, chaplains and human rights lawyers alike: deliberately or carelessly killing civilians is wrong. They are correct.
There is, however, a second argument for protecting civilians in war worth considering, as the first has plainly failed to persuade the people currently making these decisions. It should trouble Hegseth far more because it meets him on his own terms. Killing civilians loses wars.
Among Prussian army officer and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous observations was that war is the continuation of politics by other means, with every war possessing two objectives: military and political. A country can win every battle and still lose the war if it forfeits the political fight, which is a fair one-sentence history of much of America’s last half century of conflict.
In Vietnam, free-fire zones drove rural populations toward the Viet Cong, and political scientists found that the villages bombed the hardest were the places Viet Cong control deepened. Afghanistan and Iraq taught the same lesson at staggering cost as civilian casualties became the insurgents’ best recruiting tool, with each death undoing months of painstaking work.
Killing civilians corrodes the political foundations of a war effort on three fronts at once. It turns local populations against us, converting neutral bystanders into enemies and enemies into martyrs. It trains domestic support, without which no democracy can sustain a long conflict; Americans do not like to think of themselves as a country that bombs schools, and they punish leaders who make them into one. And it repels allies, who face their own voters and cannot easily justify joining a coalition that contributes to images of dead civilians.
All three dynamics are visible right now. Support for the Iran war has collapsed to 26%, and roughly 7 in 10 view President Donald Trump’s handling of the war negatively. Meanwhile, the administration is frustrated that European allies have declined to join the fight. Perhaps the Minab school is part of the answer in explaining what gives our allies reason for hesitation.
Here is what should concern Hegseth the most: his own commanders warned him of all this in advance. When Hegseth polled senior leaders in early 2025, every single one pushed back against the CHMR cuts. To this end, CENTCOM’s staff wrote in a memo that the program “enhanced our precision and accuracy, making us more lethal,” while warning that eliminating it would increase the risk of misidentifying targets.
These are combatant commanders, hardly a woke constituency. They understand that identifying who is inside a building before you destroy it is important to know, and that the roughly $80 million the enterprise cost, a rounding error in a trillion-dollar budget, brought legitimacy and staying power.
There is some good news. The Pentagon is now weighing a proposal to partially restore the program with about 70 full-time staff, and the same commanders Hegseth once overruled have endorsed it. He has yet to sign off.
He should sign it, not as an act of contrition, but because he wants to win. If lethality is the goal, then lethality worthy of the name means defeating the enemy without manufacturing new ones, and without losing the political capital, domestically and internationally, that sustains a war longer than any munition. The laws of war are a strategy for victory. The generals know it. The secretary should heed their advice.
