Despite admitting to its biggest civilian harm incidents in years, the U.S. military has not accounted for dozens of victims from 2025.
In late August, the Department of Defense released its annual report on civilian harm from U.S. military operations in 2025, acknowledging that the U.S. was responsible for killing 153 civilians and injuring another 243, in addition to nine deaths and 14 injuries newly acknowledged from previous years. The report demonstrates concerning gaps in the U.S. military’s ability to prevent civilian harm—and a lack of accountability when it does occur.
Often referred to as the “1057” report after the section of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that requires the Pentagon to submit this analysis to Congress, the annual report plays a vital role in providing public transparency and enabling congressional oversight related to the human costs of U.S. military operations. Such oversight plays a vital role in building better policies and practices to protect those caught in warfare.
It was congressional pressure and decades of lessons learned from operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria which enabled the instigation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) in 2022, which laid out steps for the military to overhaul its practices for preventing and responding to civilian harm over four years. In 2023, the plan was followed by a policy governing such practices, the Department of Defense Instruction on civilian harm mitigation and response (DODI). Together, this patchwork of Department of Defense policies and congressional mandates formed a critical framework for learning from harm and improving civilian protection efforts.
However, at the onset of the second Trump administration and under the watch of rules-of-war-averse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, targeted budget cuts and a stated prioritization of “lethality” have weakened or stalled many of those institutions and practices. In the Department of Defense’s new approach of self-imposed resource constraints for civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR), the 2025 civilian casualties report provides one of the first insights into how the U.S. military has assessed and addressed harm from its operations under the Trump administration. This is significant at a time when the U.S. has still not directly accepted responsibility for major incidents more recently, such as the strike on the first day of the Iran war that killed more than 150 children.
The report reveals a number of apparent shortcomings and raises significant concerns that merit further congressional and public scrutiny. For instance, the report suggests that the U.S. military now has seemingly little capacity to investigate even a relatively small caseload of harm claims. The report also acknowledges two of the largest mass casualty incidents in U.S. military history, both of which occurred in Yemen in 2025, yet demonstrates little appetite to respond to or learn lessons from such devastating harm.
Click here to read the full report: 2025 Civilian Casualties Report Reveals U.S. Civilian Protection Gaps | Lawfare
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