The U.S. military is denying that recent rule changes for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria has increased the risk of civilian deaths, or that the number of acceptable unintended casualities has changed.
Col. Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that while U.S. Central Command has delegated authority to authorize strikes to the U.S. commander in the region in order to speed up the process, the threshold for civilian casualties has not changed.
“The number of acceptable civilian losses is always at zero, and then commanders have to make decisions as to whether or not the military value of the target justifies the possibility of that some civilians may be killed,” Warren said.
On Tuesday, USA Today reported that the rules allowed for more civilian casaulties.
The Pentagon said the change was to enable a faster response to targets of opportunity, and reflected a maturation of the bombing campaign, in which battlefield commanders may be in the best position to assess the risk to innocents.
Warren insists making decisions at a lower level in the chain of command does not mean there is a lower level of scrutiny. “Every single target gets the same amount of rigor, the same level of standards apply to it, the same amount of effort applied to drive the civilian casualty to zero.”
The Pentagon says it has confirmed only 26 unintended civilian deaths in the 20-month air campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, during which some 40,000 weapons have been released.
While every innocent death is tragic, Warren said, “That’s remarkable by anyone’s standard.”
