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US builds blueprint to avoid civilian war casualties; Trump officials scrap it Hannah Allam, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive The Big Story newsletter as soon as it is published.
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mages from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life. Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack. Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm
Smoke from an explosion fills the sky in Tehran after an attack by the U.S. military. | Photo courtesy of Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor
was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator. Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last
spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsi-
bility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability. Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.” Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump,
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Report: FBI warns police of Iran’s desire to use drones to attack California; White House denies drone threat By City News Service
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oncerns persisted Thursday about a possible Iranian drone threat to the West Coast following a media report that the FBI warned California police departments about the possibility. “We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran alleg-
edly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the U.S. conducted strikes against Iran,” ABC News reported citing an FBI
alert. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack,” the alert said. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday at a news conference that he’s aware of the apparent threat of Iranian drone strikes on
California. He said when the war started, he activated the state emergency operations center. “Drone issues have always been top of mind,” Newsom said. “As it relates to drone strikes, we have been aware of that information,” he said. “We have been working
collaboratively through the (operations center), which we established right after the war began — the State Operations Center. Working with the Office of Emergency Services, but also working locally to make sure we See Iran attack Page 03
transmit any information that we have received.” The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Wednesday it also remains on heightened alert as authorities monitor developments related to the