Pentagon Dismantles Civilian Protection Office as Yemen Strikes Kill Hundreds

A Washington Post report documents a troubling cascade of events: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the Pentagon's office focused on mitigating unintended civilian casualties. Then came a military operation in Yemen that killed and wounded nearly 400 civilians.

This isn't abstract policy. These are mothers, children, neighbors. People who had nothing to do with military conflict but paid the price because we removed the people whose job it was to prevent exactly this.

The timing raises a hard question: What changed? Why eliminate an entire office dedicated to protecting civilians? And what does that say about how we're thinking about our military operations?

The Common Good Party believes in strength with values. That means being clear about what American military power is for: defending American interests and our allies. It does not mean operating without accountability or without the institutional safeguards meant to keep civilian harm to an absolute minimum.

We spend $820 billion a year on defense. The Pentagon cannot account for $4.65 trillion in assets across its accounting systems. Yet we're cutting the office that tracks and tries to prevent civilian deaths? That's not fiscal responsibility. That's not strength. That's just abandoning the guardrails.

A functioning military, one Americans can actually trust, operates with transparency and accountability built in. Not as an afterthought or a constraint, but as core to how it works. When we dismantle those safeguards, we don't just harm the people affected in Yemen. We damage the credibility and legitimacy of American military power itself.