WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has been instructed to do a better job of ensuring civilian safety when it is carrying out its national defense missions.
In a memorandum this week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the military to strengthen its efforts to prevent civilian deaths. Austin also wants to see improvement in the way the military investigates and acknowledges claims of civilian harm in U.S. combat operations.
The move comes after a botched airstrike in Afghanistan last year that killed 10 innocent people.
Austin wants a plan on his desk in 90 days.
"I know personally how hard we work to avoid civilian harm, and to abide by the law of armed conflict," he said Friday. "But, I've also said, we need to do better. And we will."
A Congressionally-mandated report from the RAND Corporation this week found considerable weaknesses in the military's approach to evaluating the deaths and injuries of innocent civilians.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, weighed in. In a statement, CAIR Director of Government Affairs Robert McGraw said:
"We encourage the Department of Defense to use this new review to take real and concrete actions that will protect civilians from harm.
"Over the past 20 years, drone strikes and other attacks conducted by the Pentagon and the CIA have killed thousands of Muslim civilians in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
"As long as the Pentagon views even a single civilian death as acceptable 'collateral damage,' and as long as it merely seeks to minimize the number of innocents killed during drone strikes and other bombing operations, innocent people will continue to be at risk.
"The Department of Defense must stop launching unauthorized drone strikes on foreign countries, adopt a zero civilian harm policy when engaged in legitimate military operations, and hold its leaders accountable when they take innocent lives."