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Last January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response, or CHMR, workers and replaced them with artificial intelligence. The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was cut from 40 to just nine staffers at the beginning of last year. No new hires have been made since, leaving the center unable to do its job: protecting civilians from harm due to wars we’re fighting in their regions. Remaining staff also said they are not allowed to investigate incidents like the Minab elementary school bombing that left 120 children dead on the first day of the war in Iran.   CHMR suffered across the Defense Department, as AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and SOUTHCOM saw civilian casualty prevention infrastructure cut, signaling what has been obvious for years: Those casualties are not a moral priority for the United States. CENTCOM’s CHMR has only one person remaining, while cuts to SOUTHCOM’s team left them unable to identify the full scope of civilian harm in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.“The Hegseth regime held on to a thread of the program mostly in effort to be able to say they are following the law, but the reality is the Center and its efforts have had little to no influence on or oversight or visibility on operations,” former Protection Center Chief of civilian harm assessments Wes Bryant told The Intercept. “As long as they sit in the seat, they are continuing to try to put out good work, but the reality is, most of it is being thrown into the wind, and neither institutionalized nor operationalized.”Now, instead of human beings, Hegseth is relying on a Palantir-created Maven Smart System, which a defense official claimed presents a “better layer of protection” for people living in places we’re currently attacking. “The Department’s failure to implement the CHMR [Action Plan] has profound consequences for civilians in conflict zones and makes service members’ jobs harder and riskier,” Senator Elizabeth Warren and nine other Democrats wrote in a letter to Hegseth earlier this month. “Gutting CHMR programs leads to ‘target misidentification [that] harms readiness by wasting Do[D] munitions’ and increases the operational risk of ‘civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.’”Thousands of Iranians have been killed since the downsizing of CHMR. 

Drop Site Daily: July 20, 2026

News Desk, The Cradle. Following strike on desalination plant. Iran responded to overnight US strikes on civilian infrastructure by striking targets in Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait as part of Operation Nasr 2. Around 10,000 people in Iran’s Hormozgan province are without drinking water following US strikes on a desalination plant in the coastal village of Bunji, Tasnim […]

The Houthis declare a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia, closing off the kingdom's Hormuz workaround.

Forget writing a check you can’t cash; President Donald Trump is escalating a war that the U.S. military can’t wage.Trump has made it more than clear that he’s done negotiating with Tehran, after the U.S. military launched yet another wave of strikes against Iran Saturday in retribution for the deaths of at least two U.S. military service members in Jordan. (A third service member is missing after the strikes.) Clearly, the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. is over—and there’s no sign that the U.S. plans to turn back.“The U.S. is planning for a wider war,” one U.S. official familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Monday. The official warned that U.S. military operations would be kneecapped by dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions, as well as widespread damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official added.A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to prewar levels, leaving a multiyear “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion. U.S. Central Command said that the latest series of strikes had “successfully hit Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, maritime capabilities, and missile and drone storage sites.” Iran also claimed that the U.S. attacked a nuclear power plant in a “dangerous assault on Iran’s peaceful infrastructure.”So far, at least 17 American service members have been killed in the war.