As the Biden administration’s term comes to a close, one of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin’s most notable achievements is his overhaul of the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) civilian harm policies, including the creation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP). With the start of fiscal year (FY) 2025 this month, the Pentagon’s expansive action plan for improving its civilian harm mitigation and response policies entered its fourth and final year of implementation. At this moment, it is worth taking stock of the progress already made towards implementation and what must be done over the next year to secure civilian harm mitigation and response as an enduring Pentagon priority.
The conception of the CHMR-AP was catalyzed three years ago, when on August 29 , 2021, the U.S. conducted a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including seven children and an aid worker. In November of that same year, the New York Times reported that the U.S. military concealed the effects of a 2019 airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Baghuz, Syria. Civil society groups, recognizing these strikes as emblematic of a systemic pattern of civilian harm over two decades of U.S. military operations, demanded urgent reform of DOD’s civilian protection policies and practices.
In response, the release of the CHMR-AP in August 2022, as mandated by Secretary Austin, demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to overhauling U.S. policies around preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations. Civil society welcomed the release of the Action Plan, which reflects input from protection, humanitarian, and human rights groups, and has been watching closely for the successful fruition of the Action Plan’s objectives, including over a hundred concrete actions to improve and build upon DOD civilian harm policies and practices. These actions spread across eleven thematic objectives and are sequenced into four phases that correspond with fiscal years 2022-2025. Today, using data collected through non-attributional interviews with DOD officials and publicly available primary documents, Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Stimson Center released a report evaluating DOD’s key achievements and challenges in implementing each of these actions. This article summarizes our overarching findings, including recommendations for ensuring successful implementation as the CHMR-AP enters its fourth and final year.
Laying the Foundation: Staffing and Institutions
Since the release of the CHMR-AP, DOD has focused primarily on staffing and developing civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) institutions and policies. The CHMR-AP calls for the hiring of 166 new personnel across the DOD and the creation of various new CHMR roles. DOD components experienced numerous challenges and obstacles in personnel recruitment that significantly delayed CHMR-AP implementation, such as difficulties finding candidates with the required CHMR expertise and the long duration of the civilian hiring process. However, despite the countless bureaucratic hurdles involved in creating and filling the positions for a CHMR workforce, nearly all of the 166 positions have been hired and the focus has shifted toward the substantive and technical work laid out in the CHMR-AP. The growth in CHMR-focused staff and expertise across the DOD represents one of the most significant and sustainable achievements of the initial years of CHMR-AP implementation, as these new positions will be responsible for driving CHMR efforts throughout and beyond the CHMR-AP’s four-year implementation period.
Simultaneously, DOD has established new institutions to drive and oversee CHMR efforts across the Department, including a CHMR Steering Committee of senior DOD leadership, a CHMR Directorate within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE). The latter represents a significant achievement of the DOD in institutionalizing CHMR within the Department, since the CP CoE serves as the hub and facilitator of CHMR expertise across the force and is the largest organization created by the CHMR-AP, with an anticipated staff of 50-70 personnel. The training, analysis, and learning on CHMR conducted by the CP CoE will be indispensable in the development of evidence-based best practices and innovative solutions.
The new staff and institutions created over the past two years ideally will anchor CHMR as an enduring priority within the DOD, regardless of evolutions in policies, presidential administration, or senior DOD leadership.
New Policy and Doctrine
The Pentagon has begun CHMR-AP-mandated development and updating of policies and joint doctrine to integrate CHMR considerations. One of the most important new policies to be released during the CHMR-AP period was the long-awaited DOD Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR DOD-I), which solidified the intent and activities of the CHMR-AP into official DOD policy. Among other things, the CHMR DOD-I included an official definition of “civilian harm,” which is critical to understanding the scope of CHMR policies. The CHMR DOD-I defines civilian harm as:
Civilian casualties and damage to or destruction of civilian objects (which do not constitute military objectives under the law of war) resulting from military operations. As a matter of DOD policy, other adverse effects on the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends resulting from military operations are also considered in CHMR efforts to the extent practicable. These other adverse effects do not include mere inconveniences.
The latter part of the definition speaks to the extent to which the U.S. military will consider harms beyond direct deaths and injuries. Given the wide range of direct and reverberating harms that civilians face in armed conflict, a narrow interpretation of the definition would hamper the effectiveness of the overall effort to reduce the risk and severity of civilian harm. (Loren Voss, co-author of CIVIC and Stimson’s report, discusses the definition further here. For further analysis of the DoD-I, see this author’s analysis in Just Security here.)
Numerous CHMR-AP actions relied in some way on the publication of the CHMR DOD-I, which was ultimately not signed and published until December 2023. As a result, all of the actions that depended on the CHMR DOD-I stalled, creating cascading delays across objectives.
The CHMR-AP also requires CHMR-related updates to various joint doctrine. While we were able to verify that some of these updates have been made, doctrine updates are not publicly available, and requests by the authors for access to doctrine updates were denied by the DOD. This limited transparency on doctrine obfuscated any insight into the rigor of CHMR integration.
Understanding the Civilian Environment
One new contribution of the CHMR-AP was a commitment to better understanding the civilian environment and how to integrate the civilian environment into operational planning and joint targeting. Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Planning, defined the “civilian environment” for the first time:
The factors within the operational environment that relate to civilians and their communities, including the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends.
This definition is focused primarily on physical elements and appears to omit less tangible – yet critical – elements such as culture, behavior, and the interactions between elements. Additionally, how narrowly or broadly DOD interprets elements of the definition will affect the definition’s utility. For example, DOD should consider elements “on which civilian life depends” to include not only immediate human needs such as food, water, and shelter, but also other social structures such as education and financial systems.
This definition will be operationalized through the recently established Civilian Environment Teams embedded at operational combatant commands, who will be responsible for conducting analysis and creating intelligence products on the civilian environment. Commanders and decision-makers will then utilize this intelligence in operational and contingency planning and the joint targeting process.
Responding to Civilian Harm
In recent years, DOD has failed to meaningfully respond to civilian harm caused by its operations, whether through public and private acknowledgements, formal apologies and explanations, or condolence or ex gratia payments. For example, Congress authorizes $3 million annually for ex gratia payments to civilians harmed in U.S. or partnered operations. The DOD has reported just one payment from these funds since 2020 despite many requests from civilian survivors whose harm the military has already verified.
Objective 8 of the CHMR-AP mandates that DOD review and update its guidance on responding to civilian harm, including through condolences and the public acknowledgement of harm. Our research suggests DOD is making steady progress on key Objective 8 requirements, including the creation of Civilian Harm Assessment Cells, development of an overarching institutional framework for response, updated interim regulations for ex gratia payments, and a legislative proposal for additional response authorities. These are positive developments, but until ex gratia payments or other tangible responses actually move forward, it remains unclear what, if any, effect these policy changes will have for the many civilians still awaiting redress for the devastating harm they and their families endured – the ultimate measure of success.
Finally, as noted in the CHMR-AP, DOD historically has not maintained comprehensive data related to civilian harm, hindering its ability to understand and learn from civilian harm trends, assess and investigate specific incidents of harm, and respond to harm. Objective 6 therefore requires DOD to develop standardized civilian harm reporting and data management processes. While efforts to create the civilian harm data management platform are under way, sources cited challenges to Objective 6 implementation, including stakeholders’ differing priorities and understandings of the purpose and related functions of the required platform. Sources also expressed skepticism that the platform would be fully operational by the end of FY25 as instructed by the Action Plan, noting that an emphasis on speed to meet the CHMR-AP deadline could negatively impact the quality and usefulness of the final product.
Security Cooperation
DOD’s most prominent CHMR-AP activities related to security cooperation include the development of a framework for CHMR Baselines of Allies and Partners (CBAPs), which are intended to assess the capability and willingness of partners to prevent, mitigate, and respond to civilian harm and inform the development of security cooperation programming. However, absent sufficient effort and political will to connect CBAPs with security cooperation planning and decision making, CBAPs may simply become a box-checking exercise that fails to influence predetermined policy outcomes.
Additionally, the CHMR-AP mandates the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) to establish a central coordinating CHMR office. Such an office does not currently exist and our research indicates that the agency has no current plans to do so, reflecting limited investment in the work needed to effectively integrate CHMR into U.S. security cooperation decisions and activities. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy has appeared to fill this role, including by taking a lead role in oversight over CBAP development and international engagement on CHMR, including through co-leadership of the International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.
Unfortunately, the CHMR-AP’s security cooperation commitments on paper and in international fora have stood in stark contrast to the DOD’s actual practice over the implementation period, particularly regarding the U.S. government’s virtually unconditional military support to the government of Israel in the face of catastrophic civilian harm using U.S. weapons.
What’s Next?
DOD has one year remaining of CHMR-AP implementation and much work remains to be done. Although the Action Plan only runs through FY25, the institutions and policies it created will sustain CHMR efforts in the years following. According to a DOD official, most CHMR-AP actions were on track as of the end of FY24, with completion of all actions anticipated by the end of FY25. However, while we identified significant progress in a number of areas, we were unable to verify progress in others, and our research uncovered delays and obstacles in several areas.
As DOD dives into the substantive work of the CHMR-AP during its final year, comprehensive and strategic leadership across the Department will be critical to building a robust and accountable CHMR culture and mission. Multiple sources warned of the risk of siloed courses of action and superficial monitoring of implementation progress. A cohesive and effective approach to implementation will require leadership that understands the full picture of CHMR workstreams, where they intersect, and where friction points or bottlenecks are forming, and has the vision to coordinate across CHMR workstreams where necessary.
Additionally, in the coming year, DOD will need to develop specific guidance on the continuation of CHMR efforts after CHMR-AP completion to ensure that, in the absence of clear benchmarks provided by the Action Plan, CHMR does not lose its priority status, along with funding, resources, and momentum.
Lastly, to truly deliver on the commitments laid out in the CHMR-AP – not only on paper but also in practice – DOD leadership must critically evaluate not just the implementation of each objective but also the most important measure of success: the on-the-ground impact of its CHMR efforts on the experiences of civilians in conflict.