WASHINGTON — The Pentagon formally acknowledged this week that it had dismantled a federally mandated program designed to minimize civilian deaths in U.S. military operations after an internal review concluded the effort constituted a “woke constraint on lethality.”
The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created by a 2022 law, was quietly stripped of its staff and funding over a six-month period, according to a newly released Inspector General report. The center was established after years of criticism over thousands of non-combatant casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The center’s activities were found to be inconsistent with current departmental priorities, which emphasize the unimpeded application of lethal force across all domains,” the report stated. “Mitigating civilian harm introduced unacceptable friction into targeting timelines.”
The decision was rooted in a directive from Little Donnie Dollhands ordering the removal of all “non-lethal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives” from the armed forces. Pentagon officials later clarified that civilian casualty mitigation fell within that category because it treated non-combatant lives as a protected class, thereby creating an inequitable burden on warfighters.
Wes Bryant, a former senior advisor at the center, said he was fired alongside the entire 76-person staff via an email from an address no one recognized. “I was informed my position was no longer necessary because the metric for success had been redefined to exclude non-combatant status from battle damage assessments,” Bryant said. He added that security escorted him from the building after he requested clarification on whether dead children still existed.
A Pentagon spokesperson explained the logic to reporters with visible calm. “Saving innocent people is a noble aspiration, but it must be balanced against the tactical disadvantages of restraint,” said Lt. Col. Derek Simmons. “We determined that federal law created a bureaucratic expectation that our strikes would be discriminating. That expectation is not always operationally convenient.”
The report found that $47 million in appropriated funding for the center was reprogrammed without congressional notification. Remaining personnel were reassigned to a newly created Lethality Optimization Working Group. Its first product, according to the report, was a briefing slide titled “Collateral Damage: Reframing the Narrative.”
Investigators also discovered that the center’s compliance with the 2022 law was never formally revoked. Instead, the Pentagon’s legal office issued a memo finding the statute “aspirational in nature” and non-binding when it conflicted with executive intent.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on whether the recent airstrike in Iran that killed 150 schoolchildren would have been counted under the old policy. A follow-up inquiry was forwarded to the Directorate of Strategic Messaging, which issued a statement noting that “all casualty figures are provisional and subject to multiple interpretive frameworks.”
