Lawmakers on Friday accused the Pentagon of gutting a congressionally mandated effort to reduce civilian harm after a new Inspector General investigation found the Defense Department had started shutting down the initiative despite a legal requirement to maintain it.
During a House Armed Services Committee hearing, lawmakers pressed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve over the watchdog’s report that the DoD had proposed hollowing out civilian harm mitigation efforts while prematurely scaling back parts of the program across the military.
That move, the congressmen said, was against the law.
Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the committee’s ranking Democrat, addressed the Army leader about the program, saying, “As I understand it, the Department of Defense and Army has completely defunded that. You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm.”
The Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR-AP, was launched in 2022 following scrutiny over civilian casualties from U.S. strikes and military operations overseas. The effort aimed to better track, investigate and reduce civilian harm during combat.
But the May inspector general report, released Wednesday, found that Pentagon and Army officials had proposed eliminating or significantly reducing major parts of the initiative, including the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, or CPCOE.
RELATED
In May 2025, the report said, the DoD submitted a legislative proposal asking Congress to repeal the law requiring the center.
The watchdog also found that meetings had stopped, personnel had been lost or reassigned, and some funding was halted even though no formal decision had been made about the program’s future.
“As a result, the DoW may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy (DoDI 3000.17), a policy required by Federal law,” the report said, adding that Joint Staff and command officials had linked the program’s performance to mission success.
Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., an Army veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — and a key supporter of the CPCOE — argued that the military’s long-term success depended on staying lethal and maintaining the local population’s approval, which was endangered when civilians died or were brutally maimed in combat operations.
“Over the course of those tours, what became very obvious to me is that what we did lack was a full understanding about how to win the support of local populations,” he said, adding later, “We ultimately lost the support of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, who we were there to serve and to help liberate.”
Driscoll acknowledged the concerns and affirmed the Pentagon’s legal obligations. He also defended the Army’s handling of the program, arguing that the Pentagon remained committed to reducing civilian harm and suggesting that some of the disruption identified in the report stemmed from organization restructuring instead of an intentional effort to scrap the program.
RELATED
Smith’s closing comments suggested he did not believe Pentagon assurances that the civilian harm efforts were being reorganized and not dismantled.
“I think a good number of members on this committee do not trust the Secretary of Defense on civilian harm,” he said, adding, “And we don’t trust the notion that it’s just being moved around. It seems like it’s being gutted, and that there is no focus on it whatsoever.”
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
