> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.
Negligence was involved.
DEI for drunk white men who look good on TV got us Hegseth, who's now rather hilariously requiring gender-affirming treatment for the troops. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-moves-forward-wi...)
And I hedged that. Anything short of 100% responsibility with humans is a failure. I get investigating how it occurred, but that needs be very careful to separate ought from is.
The obvious questions is when the intelligence needed to be updated (ie, when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base) and when Iran made that fact public, or at least when the US intel should have figured it out with satellites and other sources.
If it's years old then definitely on human. Intelligence will always be flaky in these hostile countries.
That's quite common. The US DOD operates 163 K-12 schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_S...
In this case:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...
> The findings reveal that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.
(setting aside when civilians are purposefully harmed which is a conversation about morals rather than the capability to make correct decisions)
What I am getting at is, has AI really made the problem worse or has the mechanism just changed?
When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
> An AI can be tried in a court.
An AI can't be tried in a court.