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Hegseth Polled the Nine Combatant Commanders on Killing the Military's Civilian-Protection Program Expecting Them to Call It "Woke" — Every One Said Keep It, and He Cut It Anyway

ProPublica reported on August 25, 2026 that before gutting the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put the question to the nation's top combatant commanders. He appears to have expected them to agree with him that protecting civilians was a "woke" distraction from "maximum lethality." Instead, according to internal documents and current and former defense officials, every command that answered said the program should be preserved. Gen. Erik Kurilla appealed the decision directly. Hegseth made the cuts regardless. CHMR was created by Congress and built out over more than a decade of bipartisan work following civilian-casualty failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. Under Hegseth the Defense Department fired the staff of the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and cut CHMR positions at the combatant commands by more than 90 percent. Hegseth has publicly framed the broader project in his own words: "We became 'the woke department.' … We're done with that shit," and "No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement." The consequences arrived with the Iran war. The U.S. military has killed hundreds of noncombatants since the mission was gutted, including a strike on a school. A Defense Department inspector general report and the resulting congressional letters became the paper trail. After the blowback, the department is now weighing a partial restoration of the program it dismantled. Congress had been on this before the August revelation. On April 20, Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) opened an investigation with nine colleagues, writing that Hegseth's attempts to gut the institutions "contradicts more than a decade of bipartisan consensus and DoD-led reforms." On July 6, Warren led ten lawmakers — including combat veterans Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) — in a letter accusing the administration of acting "potentially in violation of federal law." Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on House Armed Services, told Hegseth flatly: "You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm." No Republican member of Congress is on record about the commanders' poll as of publication. The Pentagon's response to the letters has been that it "will respond directly to the authors."

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

A UN Fact-Finding Mission Says There Are "Reasonable Grounds" to Believe the United States Committed War Crimes in Iran — Including the Strike on a Girls' Elementary School in Minab That Killed About 120 Children — Six Months After Trump Said "That Was Done by Iran" and the Pentagon's Own Investigation Stayed Secret

On September 17, 2026, the independent international fact-finding mission on Iran, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, reported that it had found "reasonable grounds" to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes during the opening of the February 2026 war — a pair of attacks the mission says killed at least 178 civilians. The central finding concerns the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern city of Minab, where Iranian officials say about 120 schoolchildren, most of them girls between 7 and 12, were among roughly 168 to 175 people killed. The mission concluded the strike was an indiscriminate attack causing loss of civilian life, amounting to a war crime under international law. The same report accuses Iran's government of crimes against humanity in its crackdown on anti-government protesters. The finding lands on a question US officials have refused to answer for six months. On March 7, aboard Air Force One, President Trump blamed Iran for the school bombing without evidence — "No, in my opinion, based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran" — while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing nearby, declined to echo him, saying only "We're certainly investigating." Open-source analysts identified a US Tomahawk cruise missile in footage of the strike; the US is the only combatant in the war that fields Tomahawks. A preliminary US assessment reportedly found the United States "likely" responsible but not deliberately targeting the school. Congress has pressed for the Pentagon's findings all year without success. In March, Tim Kaine led more than 40 senators demanding a "swift investigation"; in July, Kirsten Gillibrand led 24 colleagues demanding the Department release the investigation it reportedly completed in April. As of the report's publication, the White House, State Department and Pentagon had not responded to requests for comment, and the Pentagon investigation remains unreleased. Stances below are relative to the finding of US responsibility and the demand for public accountability: "support" marks officials pressing for the investigation and its release, "oppose" marks officials attributing the strike elsewhere or resisting the accounting.