Washington — The Pentagon has formally acknowledged that U.S. military operations killed more than 150 innocent civilians and injured over 240 people in 2025, with three airstrikes in Yemen accounting for every casualty the department confirmed.
The newly released tally, which did not include any deaths from airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, comes as the Pentagon prosecutes a far broader military operation against Iran that began this year. It also follows cuts to some offices dedicated to mitigating civilian casualties during the tenure of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has vowed to focus on “lethality” rather than “tepid legality.”
A report submitted to Congress late Monday and obtained by CBS News shows military strikes during the campaign against Yemen’s Houthi militia group, named Operation Rough Rider, killed 153 civilians and injured another 243 last year.
From March to May 2025, the U.S. military bombed targets in Yemen related to the Iran-backed Houthis to prevent the group from attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea. The report found that “more likely than not,” five civilians were killed on April 6 near the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, 80 were killed on April 17 near Ras Isa Port and another 68 were killed on April 28 near Saada.
The military did not conduct site visits or interviews to make the assessments, but it relied on U.S. intelligence, imagery and public reporting, according to the report.
NBC News and The Washington Post were first to report details on the assessments.
Airwars, an organization that tracks civilian harm in conflicts, reported last year at least 258 civilians may have been killed in Operation Rough Rider. The report from the Pentagon has at least 153, but notes that as of earlier this year, there were 15 other incidents in Yemen the military was assessing in response to reports received through nongovernmental organizations.
The report is also notable for what it does not count. It does not include any of the casualties from the controversial strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, which numbered about 120 last year and 95 this year.
The Trump administration says the boat strikes — which began in September 2025 — are intended to target drug traffickers from cartels that the administration considers terrorist groups. Some legal experts have said the strikes amount to illegal extrajudicial killings because U.S. forces are prohibited from intentionally targeting civilians, including individuals suspected of criminal activity, unless they meet the legal standard governing the use of military force.
Congress mandated in the 2018 annual defense policy bill that the Pentagon submit reports — known in military parlance as “1057 reports” — on civilian casualties during the preceding year. Nearly 500 civilians had been killed in U.S. military operations in 2017, the first year of required reporting. The number significantly decreased after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, to just one killed in 2023 and two in 2024, but climbed again with last year’s major military operation against the Houthis.
“The U.S. military is steadfastly committed to limiting harm to civilians, and DoW has a strong record of compliance with the law of war,” states a tranche of the opening statement.
Pentagon’s civilian harm office faces budget cuts
This year’s figures on civilian casualties come amid another recently released Pentagon report that paints a portrait of a small office charged with reducing civilian harm during U.S. military operations. The office has sought to preserve and advance its work as it navigates budget and personnel cuts, not only to its own operations but also to the expansive U.S. military program of civilian harm mitigation.
The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence’s annual report to Congress, released in late July, underscored its expanding training programs and partnerships across the Defense Department, while also documenting a year marked by shrinking resources and an uncertain future for the office.
The center said it continued to support military commands through such efforts as hosting collaboration workshops, running war gaming exercises and studying past operations — including Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. air and naval campaign against Houthi targets in Yemen last year. But the report also acknowledged the toll of budget cuts and organizational changes.
Staffing at the center dropped to just nine full-time employees — seven civilians and two U.S. service members — by the end of the 2025 fiscal year, down from a staff of 40 civilian, military and contractor support employees, according to the report. Separate from the center, the Pentagon cut both budgets and staffing across the U.S. military’s civilian harm mitigation program.
Hegseth has said he wants to “untie the hands of our warfighters” and emphasize “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” In his initial months at the Pentagon, he fired the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force, and he previously disparaged military lawyers, or judge advocates general, as “jagoffs.”
On protecting civilians, Hegseth told Congress earlier this year, “the United States military never targets civilians, and puts constructs in place to ensure that [to] the maximum extent possible, we do not harm or hit civilians.”
During Hegseth’s tenure, the Pentagon has sought to eliminate the center of excellence, arguing in documents submitted to Congress that the center duplicates many of the tasks already performed through the Defense Department’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program.
But the Pentagon has also moved to gut not just the center, but the military’s larger civilian harm program, which was created in 2022. In the Trump administration’s 2026 budget request, the Defense Department described the purpose of the cuts to personnel and funding as “disestablishment of the program.” The request proposed reducing personnel funding by over $2 million and mission support by more than $9.5 million, according to Pentagon documents.
U.S. officials, who spoke to CBS News under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said cuts to the center and the larger civilian harm mitigation program amounted to roughly a 90% reduction in personnel since March 2025.
The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was borne out of an action plan that the Pentagon rolled out in 2022 after it acknowledged several recent botched airstrikes.
“Protecting civilians from harm in connection with military operations is not only a moral imperative, it is also critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield,” reads the opening introduction of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan from August 2022.
The plan called for the Pentagon to better prevent harm to civilians during military conflict, with steps like developing standardized data collection, creating dedicated positions for civilian harm mitigation efforts and establishing the center of excellence. The center would coordinate analysis, training and lessons learned across the Defense Department.
The center was codified and signed into law by Congress in the 2023 annual defense policy bill, which also required the Pentagon to publicly release an annual report about the center’s work, like the one published last month.
But the report from the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence arrived just weeks after a Defense Department inspector general report concluded that key elements of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation enterprise had already begun to erode due to cuts and inaction.
Shortly after Hegseth entered the Pentagon, senior officials proposed changes to the center of excellence and the action plan, according to the report. As of April 2026, Hegseth still had not made a decision. In the absence of action, civilian harm mitigation experts left their positions, the Army stopped funding the data management platform and the center of excellence lost large numbers of personnel and leaders.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told the inspector general a review of the center of excellence was due in January 2026 and a review of the Defense Department’s civilian casualty policy was due by the end of the year. The status of those reviews is unclear.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
The Atlantic reported earlier this month that the Pentagon is considering restoring as many as half of the roles that were cut as it grapples with allegations of civilian casualties, in particular the alleged strike on a girls’ school in the opening days of the Iran war that the Iranian government says killed about 170 people.
The Pentagon has yet to release the results of its investigation into that strike, which could become the most significant test of whether the military’s post-Afghanistan civilian harm reforms functioned as intended.
