When President Trump plucked Pete Hegseth from Fox News to be his secretary of defense, Pentagon officials scrambled to get with their new boss’s pugnacious program: Lethality and battlefield swagger were in; “wokeness” and operational restraint were out. Hegseth’s subsequent purge at the Defense Department included the dramatic downsizing of staff dedicated to avoiding civilian casualties in war. They had been part of a military-wide system built up after tens of thousands of ordinary people were killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress mandated some of the enhancements. But Hegseth fired or reassigned almost all of the staff working on the program.Now the Pentagon is considering restoring as many as half of the roles that were cut as the military reckons with the human impact of its five-month, on-again, off-again war with Iran, in particular an air strike in the first hours of the conflict that killed almost 170 people, most of them children, at a school in Minab, in southern Iran. The potential reversal, which hasn’t previously been reported, now awaits Hegseth’s signature.A Pentagon inspector-general report this spring found that the department’s deep cuts in civilian-harm protections may have violated laws designed to safeguard noncombatants. Democrats are urging the Defense Department to reverse course. Hegseth’s comments and service history suggest that he will do otherwise. A Pentagon official—who, like other officials, spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations—said in a statement that the setup for preventing civilian harm is “currently undergoing a strategic reassessment to inform its future reorganization” and would remain in compliance with congressional requirements, but that no final decisions have been made.Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the National Guard, arrived at the Pentagon early last year with a record of railing against what he characterized as unnecessary shackles on battlefield operators, such as military “jagoffs” (a play on judge advocates general, known as JAGs) and international law. His on-air advocacy for troops accused or convicted of war crimes helped forge his bond with Trump. Within months of his taking office, the Pentagon had slashed the number of total staff working to prevent and investigate civilian-casualty incidents by about 90 percent.Hegseth brought the same gloves-off mentality to the war in Iran, which remains in a protracted limbo that has crippled maritime commerce and thrust Persian Gulf allies into open conflict with Tehran. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth told reporters early in the conflict. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” Trump also has made repeated threats to strike bridges and power plants, actions that under many circumstances could constitute war crimes.[Read: The forever negotiation]Hegseth has said that Tehran positions its military assets alongside civilian sites such as hospitals and schools. Iran has also struck apartment buildings and energy facilities across the Gulf and killed at least 18 U.S. troops in the region. But the strike on the school in Minab appears to have been the worst on civilians in a U.S. operation since the Gulf War in 1991. Immediately after, U.S. defense officials professed disbelief that the U.S. military could have hit a school. They wondered whether the Israeli military had done it. Trump suggested that Iran was responsible. But the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile, a weapon Iran does not have. And an initial examination found that although Iran’s military had once occupied the building, that was no longer true. The U.S. government had possessed intelligence about the site’s conversion into a school; that information never made its way to the strike’s planners, defense officials told us.At the recent G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters that “nobody did that on purpose” and said that the findings of an official Pentagon investigation—the only one of its kind so far in the Iran war—should eventually be released. Hegseth has repeatedly said that the U.S. military does not intentionally target civilians and has promised to make the investigation’s conclusions public, but he has not said when or whether that will include all of the report.Inside Iran, the death toll in Minab—168—has become a defining symbol of U.S. aggression. State media and government officials regularly invoke the incident and commemorate it in public ceremonies. During the FIFA World Cup, members of Iran’s team wore #168 pins and posed before rows of children’s backpacks.Military operations are judged almost instantaneously by audiences around the world, making public perception an important strategic consideration, Geoffrey Corn, the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told us. Corn is a proponent of embedding experts on avoiding civilian casualties in military targeting teams. The most important thing the United States could have done soon after the Minab strike, Corn told us, would have been to publicly address what happened: Was the strike based on faulty intelligence? Outdated information? A missile malfunction, or some other error? “Because if you don’t, you’re ceding the narrative to anybody who wants to condemn you,” Corn added. “You are setting the conditions for strategic failure.”The need to improve protections for civilians was a lesson learned at the cost of many innocent lives over two decades of U.S. counterinsurgent wars.In September 2006, the Pentagon formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as “the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.” The conclusion from Iraq and Afghanistan was that battlefield success alone was insufficient; military force had to be perceived as not only lawful but also just and prudent if it was going to achieve lasting results. Corn pointed to the United States’ reputational damage caused by the Trump administration’s lethal campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, and the global outcry against Israel over the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.[Read: The results are in on Trump’s boat-strike campaign]Civilian-harm mitigation within the U.S. military ramped up during the campaign against the Islamic State. Watchdog groups such as the United Kingdom–based Airwars began working closely with U.S. Central Command, providing on-the-ground information for U.S. forces who often struggled to assess the results of their strikes. After a U.S. drone mistakenly killed 10 civilians during America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, then–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered up the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to formalize those practices across the Pentagon.Over time, Centcom and other combatant commands built up these operations. Experts on civilian patterns of life and other advisers helped military targeters assess risks before strikes were launched and investigated casualty reports after. The Pentagon opened an office to train personnel across the ranks and incorporate lessons into future operations. (The gap between official and outside estimates on civilian casualties has at times, however, remained wide: Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2018; the official toll is roughly 1,500.)Some of that structure still exists, but is much diminished. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has been engaged everywhere—Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela. In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the U.S. says that it has killed 221 people in small boats over 11 months; the U.S. alleges that the crews are smuggling drugs but has presented no evidence. Human-rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran in the U.S. and Israeli air campaign.“Over the last year, we have seen a total disconnect between the willingness to wage wars all over the world, at an unprecedented pace and scale, while at the same time all but abandoning their leading role in setting up the systems and approaches needed to better protect civilians,” Emily Tripp, the head of Airwars, told us.The leadership of the Pentagon’s combatant commands have uniformly voiced support internally for the restoration of the personnel, a U.S. official told us, because they value the additional safeguards. Commanders learned over the years that civilian casualties fueled insurgent recruitment, eroded local support, and undermined political objectives. Advances in intelligence, surveillance, and precision targeting also have helped reduce the risk of hitting civilians. (Civilian-protection advisers were never given the power to overrule or veto actions proposed by commanders; they could only advise and provide additional information.)“Restoring personnel dedicated to civilian protection—and actually allowing them to do their jobs—is one critical step towards preventing future harm,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told us.Even if Hegseth endorses the proposal, future success may depend on whether he embraces a different tone. “If there is a change in attitude from the top, that could be significant,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told us. “But if this is a box-checking exercise, it won’t make a difference.”[Read: The timidity of America’s top generals]Hegseth and Trump have both, at least so far in the Iran war, used much more belligerent language than their own military commanders have. The White House, early on, posted images of U.S. strikes alongside the caption “No pause. No hesitation.” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, had a contrasting message for troops in a memo this spring. “Our commitment to the law of armed conflict is not a constraint on our lethality,” he wrote. “It is the source of our legitimacy.”A Hegseth endorsement of the proposal to restore protections against civilian harm would mark a rare acknowledgement that his radical reforms at the Pentagon may, at least in one area, have gone too far.