Pentagon Scraps Civilian Protection as U.S. Bombs Rain on the Global Poor

The United States has a machine that kills children, and Pete Hegseth just ripped out the one part designed to make it flinch.

Ten lawmakers warned the defense secretary this week that gutting the military's civilian protection program is a leadership failure that puts service members in danger and rots whatever is left of America's moral standing. They are right, but they are being polite. Let us not be polite.

The Pentagon's own inspector general found the program largely inactive. Defense leadership even withheld access to the tools that track how many civilians the empire is grinding into dust. That is not incompetence. That is a decision.

The framework had a bureaucratic name, civilian harm mitigation and response. What it actually did was embed people in targeting rooms whose job was to whisper, wait, that is a school. Under Hegseth, the mission was slashed by roughly 90 percent, leaving a handful of staffers to watch over a killing spree spreading across Africa and the Middle East.

A School Full of Girls, Then Silence

In February, on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, an apparent American strike killed over 150 students and staff at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab. Open-source investigators traced the wreckage to a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile. The Washington Post reported the school was on a target list and may have been mistaken for a military site.

Mistaken. Say the word slowly. Somewhere in Minab a father dug through concrete with his hands, pulling out backpacks and small shoes, looking for a daughter who had left that morning knowing her multiplication tables.

Nearly five months later, Washington has explained nothing. Hegseth says the investigation will take as long as necessary. It always does. The dead can wait forever.

Conflict monitors have logged a surge in civilian casualties in Somalia and Yemen, where strikes have exploded under the second Trump administration. Hegseth calls the guardrails he tore down hindrances to his lethality doctrine. Lethality. A gym-bro word for burying teenagers.

This Is the Oldest Story in the Hemisphere

None of this is new to anyone raised south of the Rio Grande. We have watched this movie in Spanish for two centuries.

In 1953 the CIA overthrew Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz because he handed 1.5 million acres back to 100,000 landless farmers. The reward for those farmers was a genocide that eventually killed 200,000 people. In Chile in 1973, Washington helped Pinochet murder union leaders and torture 30,000 souls in stadiums where children once cheered for soccer.

In the 1980s the United States poured a billion dollars into El Salvador's military to crush peasant unions. Seventy-five thousand civilians died. In Nicaragua, U.S.-trained Contras bombed the very hospitals and schools we now pretend to protect abroad.

Here is a detail Americans rarely learn: the Panama Canal that fills U.S. shipping companies with profit was dug on the corpses of some 5,000 Caribbean laborers, men who died of malaria and dynamite so that others could grow rich on tolls. Their descendants still live in tin-roofed neighborhoods a short walk from the locks.

The pattern never changes. A catastrophe. A pledge to learn. A slow fade to silence. Then the next school, the next village, the next Tomahawk.

The Empire Is Still Hungry

The civilian protection plan itself was born from blood. After a 2021 drone strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine relatives, seven of them children, the Pentagon apologized and promised reform. Congress mandated a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. It was a modest thing, an attempt to make mercy a full-time job instead of a press release.

Hegseth killed it because mercy is woke. He told a room of officers, we are done with that, and cheered as he fired respected commanders who dared to say protecting people was the point.

Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal once described insurgent math: for every innocent killed, at least ten new enemies are born. So the very policy Hegseth calls strength is a factory for the wars that will send more American kids home in boxes. The empire eats its own children last, but it eats them.

Meanwhile in 2025, U.S. military aid to Honduras climbed to 150 percent of 2020 levels, and Honduran police used that muscle to kill 300 Indigenous activists who did nothing more radical than block a mining company from poisoning their river.

Somewhere tonight a woman in Yemen sleeps beside an empty mat where her son used to sleep. Somewhere in Minab a bell will never ring again. And in Washington, the man who unplugged the alarm is telling the country it is finally free to be lethal.

Ask yourself who taught him that word. Ask whose taxes bought the missile. Then look at the small shoe in the rubble and decide if you can still call it a mistake.