Civilian Deaths Still Shadow Precision Warfare

The Iran war is testing whether transparency and accountability can keep pace with modern combat.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command overseeing military operations against Iran, was asked about reports of civilian casualties resulting from the American air campaign. Cooper told senators that among more than 13,600 U.S. strikes conducted during the conflict, his command had one active civilian casualty investigation: the destruction of an elementary school during the opening days of the war that Iranian officials say killed 175 people, many of them children.

Senators pressed Cooper on why his command was reviewing that one civilian-casualty incident despite public reporting documenting damage to 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities. Cooper said the military had “no way” to corroborate those reports, but he also acknowledged the command had not investigated the cited incidents.

(Olena Bartienieva/iStock)

Wartime casualty figures are difficult to verify in real time, especially when strikes occur inside a closed information environment, when adversaries and outside actors spread misinformation or disinformation, and when independent investigators have limited access. But senators were not asking Cooper to accept every outside allegation at face value. They were asking why reports of wider civilian harm had not become an ongoing investigative priority.

Cooper’s testimony came after months in which the administration’s public explanation of the Iran war has shifted repeatedly, from its goals to its progress to its expected duration. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have often treated public messaging as part of the campaign itself. In that environment, a narrow claim about one active civilian casualty investigation does not reassure skeptics. It invites more questions about what the military has looked for, what it has chosen not to prioritize, and how much the public is being asked to accept on trust.

That credibility problem is compounded by what has been on display since 2023 in Gaza. Israeli officials often explained that civilian deaths were the result of military necessity and Hamas operating among civilians. Skepticism about official explanations for civilian casualties appears in every war, but Gaza has made it harder to separate claims of precision and military necessity from the daily images of destroyed neighborhoods, damaged hospitals, and civilian suffering.

That does not mean Iran presents no comparable battlefield dilemmas. Iran’s military infrastructure, like Hamas’s operations in Gaza, exists within populated civilian areas, and international humanitarian law recognizes the dangers this creates. Militaries confronting adversaries embedded among civilians face decisions that are often ugly and imperfect, even under disciplined rules of engagement. But that reality does not eliminate the responsibility to investigate civilian casualties seriously and transparently.

The United States has been here before. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials routinely described U.S. operations as among the most precise in military history. In many respects, they were. Precision-guided munitions, expanded surveillance capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated targeting procedures dramatically reduced civilian casualties compared with previous eras of warfare.

But “reduced” never meant “eliminated.” The 2015 strike on the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz killed dozens of people after U.S. forces misidentified the target. In 2021, during the final days of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Pentagon initially defended a Kabul drone strike as a successful operation against a terrorist threat before later acknowledging that civilians, including children, had been killed instead.

Those incidents are not analogous to the My Lai massacre, a deliberate mass killing of civilians by American troops during the Vietnam War. But they were reminders that the problems embedded in the fog of war persist. “Precision” weapons may narrow blast radiuses, but they do not eliminate flawed intelligence, bureaucratic momentum, confirmation bias, or the pressure to defend operational decisions once they have been publicly justified.

Wars fought at high operational tempo make those problems worse. Information does not move upward neatly and comprehensively inside command structures. Analysts and operations centers are flooded with fragmentary reporting, competing intelligence streams, battle damage assessments, and minute-by-minute targeting updates.

Having worked in intelligence analysis during active operations, I can attest that the issue is not indifference; it is prioritization: Civilian casualty reports become one stream among many, and without sustained pressure from senior leaders, some remain fragmentary, delayed, or overtaken by immediate operational demands.

That reality makes leadership priorities even more important. Organizations focus on what senior leaders signal are operational and strategic priorities. If commanders insist on and resource for rigorous post-strike investigation — all resulting damage, including civilian harm — reports are tracked, gaps are filled, and harder questions get asked.

That is why staffing matters here. After years of criticism over civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, a more rigorous civilian harm review process was formalized under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2022, which established a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and dedicated personnel across the department. Press reports now suggest that much of that infrastructure had been sharply reduced under the second Trump administration.

The danger in the Iran campaign is not necessarily that the United States has suddenly become reckless. It is the possibility that years of institutional caution and hard-earned lessons about civilian harm can erode under the combined pressure of tempo, politics, and confidence in technology.

Adm. Cooper may ultimately prove correct that many reported incidents were not caused by U.S. strikes. Some allegations will certainly collapse under scrutiny. But publicly projecting near-certainty while acknowledging that most incidents have not yet been thoroughly investigated — and the resources to do so have been gutted — risks creating the impression that conclusions preceded inquiries.

Democracies do not maintain credibility because they avoid mistakes in war. They maintain credibility because they confront mistakes honestly. The fog of war is a terrible reality in a terrible enterprise, but that should be all the more reason to apply the same discipline used to find targets to the harder task of finding uncomfortable facts, including those that collide with preferred narratives.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

---