The Pentagon has repeatedly claimed to do everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties when conducting drone strikes, but problems continue to occur despite their best efforts.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has approved two investigations into claims of civilian deaths in recent months as U.S. Central Command conducts one of its own. Amid all of these inquiries, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has repeatedly said that the military works diligently to avoid killing innocent people.
The U.S. military erroneously targeted an aid worker in Afghanistan on Aug. 29, killing him and nine other innocent people, including seven children.
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At the time the drone strike was launched, the United States was conducting an evacuation effort at the end of its 20-year Afghanistan War. Just days earlier, an ISIS-K terrorist detonated an explosive, killing 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 people outside the airport amid evacuations of the at-risk Afghans and other nationals who wanted to escape following the Taliban’s rise to power.
U.S. Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami Said investigated the strike and concluded there were no illegalities with the strike, and Austin has signed off on it. The Pentagon’s Kirby announced on Dec. 13 that no military personnel would be punished for the strike.
Jason Killmeyer, a national security and foreign policy expert, told the Washington Examiner that he wasn’t surprised no one was being punished for the errant strike because “I don’t believe that bureaucracies can hold themselves particularly well accountable.”
Austin, last month, also ordered an investigation into a March 18, 2019, strike that killed 80 people. Of those who died, CENTCOM could only confirm that among the dead were 16 fighters and four civilians. U.S. Army Forces Commander Gen. Michael Garrett has to submit the findings of his investigation roughly by the end of February.
The strike was carried out by Talon Anvil, a top-secret American strike cell that launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria. Officials repeatedly sidestepped procedures designed to prevent civilian casualties, according to The New York Times.
More recently, CENTCOM reported that a strike in Syria targeting a senior al Qaeda “leader and planner” also could have killed civilians. They’re still investigating the results of the Dec. 3 strike.
“We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them. The possibility of a civilian casualty was immediately self-reported to U.S. Central Command. We are initiating a full investigation of the allegations and will release the results when appropriate,” said Capt. Bill Urban, a CENTCOM spokesman.
Despite Urban’s comments, Killemeyer said he doesn’t believe the military does “everything possible” to avoid innocent deaths.
“Is it fair to say we do everything possible to prevent civilian casualties? No, it isn’t, nor do I think that we ask our military to do so,” he told the Washington Examiner in a phone interview. “So I think that DOD is referring more to the set of steps that they have put in place. And I think that the American people through our political branches are expecting from DOD different things than we’re actually asking for them for upfront.”
The U.S. ended its war in Afghanistan after nearly two decades at the end of August. In its final days overseas, as the Taliban overthrew the Ghani government, the U.S. military evacuated more than 100,000 Afghan allies, Americans, or third-country nationals who feared living under the Taliban regime, though thousands were left behind.
Rep. Michael Waltz, a former Green Beret, told the Washington Examiner that he experienced firsthand how insurgents would use civilians in an attempt to gain an advantage over U.S. troops.
“Insurgents, in general, everyone that I fought against — from Boko Haram to ISIS, Taliban, al Qaeda — all use, on a regular basis, civilians as human shields. They know our tactics,” he explained. “They know our aversion to causing civilian casualties, and it puts them in a win-win situation.”
With the U.S. out of Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s new strategy in the region will rely on over-the-horizon strikes, though the lack of a physical presence in the country will make gathering the necessary intelligence for such strikes more difficult, experts believe.
“An over-the-horizon strategy dramatically increases the odds of errant strikes. We were rightfully horrified and should still be horrified,” Killmeyer explained. “The less intelligence you have on the ground, the more likely these things are to take place. And if we end up getting word of imminent attack planning but have very little else to accompany that word or that chatter, we will be primed to make similar mistakes.”
Similarly, the lack of a presence “absolutely” increases the probability of a rogue strike because “the best intelligence is from humans on the ground,” Matt Kroenig, a former Defense official and current Georgetown University professor, told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
“With Afghanistan in particular, I think it is more likely that we’re going to make mistakes in targeting now that U.S. forces aren’t there,” he added.
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Discussing both the flaws of the Aug. 29 strike and the difficulties of conducting an over-the-horizon strategy without a presence, Waltz also explained, “Every strike that I’ve taken, we get what we call multi-intelligence discipline confirmation. You have somebody on the ground verifying, you have signals intelligence verifying, you have some other type of verification for what that drone operator is seeing.”
In light of the repeated instances of civilian casualties and the conclusion of the Aug. 29 strike investigation, Kirby told reporters that the Pentagon is “not going to be above or afraid to make changes to the way we analyze information and intelligence, act on that intelligence, target and actually the actual execution procedures of a strike — we’re not going to be afraid to make changes,” though he didn’t announce any changes.
