The EWIPA Declaration and U.S. Efforts to Minimize Civilian Harm

From April 22-24, 2024, representatives from more than 90 countries met in Norway for the Oslo Conference on the Political Declaration, the first international follow-up conference to review the implementation of the Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas (the EWIPA Declaration). Representatives from United Nations offices, the International Committee for the Red Cross, and more than 50 non-government organizations also attended.

The EWIPA Declaration

More than 50 States, including the United States, formally endorsed the EWIPA Declaration at a high-level international conference in Dublin in 2022. The United States participated actively in the negotiation of the Declaration and stated its support for the Declaration, as well as its understandings and approach toward implementing the Declaration in June 2022.

The EWIPA Declaration seeks to address the use of explosive weapons in populated areas which, as the Declaration notes, “can have a devastating impact on civilians and civilian objects.” The Declaration includes a number of measures that endorsing States will take, reflecting their commitment “to strengthening the protection of civilians and civilian objects during and after armed conflict, addressing the humanitarian consequences arising from armed conflict involving the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, and strengthening compliance with and improving the implementation of applicable International Humanitarian Law.”

The United States has been proud to endorse the EWIPA Declaration as we believe this Declaration can help States do critically important work to improve the protection of civilians in armed conflict.

As U.S. officials have stated, the United States believes that the commitments set forth in the EWIPA Declaration “are already reflected in existing U.S. military policy and practice,” and yet “[t]he U.S. military continually strives to improve its policies and practices relating to the protection of civilians in armed conflict.” This is because, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has noted, there are important moral, legal, and strategic imperatives associated with civilian harm mitigation and response. Secretary Austin has observed that our civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts “directly contribute to achieving mission success” and “[t]he excellence and professionalism in operations essential to preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm is also what makes us the world’s most effective military force.”

Thus, from the U.S. perspective, efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm reflect a convergence of military and humanitarian interests, and our CHMR improvements not only enable us to better mitigate and respond to civilian harm, they also enable our forces to operate more effectively.

U.S. Reforms

Recognizing this convergence, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is undertaking a range of reforms and institutional innovations to improve our CHMR approach. Elaborated more fully in the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) and the more recently released DoD Instruction on CHMR (the CHMR DoDI), these efforts advance both national security and humanitarian interests. And although the United States has understood U.S. military practice before these efforts began to meet its commitments under the EWIPA Declaration, these efforts, by seeking to improve U.S. military practice, demonstrate the high priority the DoD places on efforts to protect civilians.

Since the approval of the CHMR-AP in 2022, DoD has been busily implementing the action plan, with new reforms and important innovations that create a mutually reinforcing framework—an institutional ecosystem—that allows us to improve our CHMR approach now and to continue to develop and improve over time.

For instance, the DoD has created structures to ensure appropriate leadership and oversight of implementation. This includes the CHMR Steering Committee—a forum led by senior leaders within the DoD to ensure effective implementation of the CHMR-AP and to address other issues related to civilian harm mitigation and response. The CHMR Steering Committee is tri-chaired by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Comptroller (who oversees all budgetary and fiscal matters for the Department). The seniority of the participants in this Steering Committee demonstrates the importance of this effort inside the Pentagon.

The DoD has also created new institutions. It has established the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE) to serve as the DoD’s hub of analysis, learning, and training related to CHMR, and to facilitate the institutionalization of good practices across the force. In addition, DoD has also created a new stand-alone Directorate for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Policy within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy) to provide policy guidance and oversight for CHMR issues relevant to the joint force and to address a wide range of CHMR issues related to DoD activity.

As these new institutions coalesce, the DoD is forming and filling new positions envisioned in the CHMR-AP. In total, we expect to have 166 new positions throughout the Department. Many of these positions will have important new roles, including:

– Civilian Harm Mitigation Response Officers (CHMROs) embedded in appropriate combatant and operational commands;

– Civilian Harm Assessment Cells to better investigate and assess whether civilian harm may have been caused by military operations, and what lessons might be learned;

– Civilian Harm Assessment and Investigation Officers who will improve and standardize our efforts on that front; and

– Civilian Environment Teams that will help illuminate the non-adversarial aspects of the battlefield for commanders.

We are already seeing a difference throughout the force with the introduction of these positions.

Importantly, we are also incorporating guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of operations into strategy, doctrine, plans, professional military education (PME), training, and exercises, so that DoD is more effectively prepared to mitigate and respond to civilian harm, and to achieve strategic success in any operating environment. And we are establishing and resourcing civilian harm mitigation and response as a component of security cooperation programs, and, as appropriate, promoting ally and partner CHMR efforts.

DoD Instruction 3000.17

In addition to the CHMR-AP, a new DoD instruction (DoDI) was released on December 21, 2023, on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (DoDI 3000.17). The instruction represents a significant milestone in achieving the objectives set forth in the CHMR-AP. Where the action plan laid out a series of major steps to improve the DoD’s approach to CHMR, the CHMR DoDI sets out Department-wide policies, responsibilities, and procedures, and will serve as an enduring framework for Department-wide efforts for many years to come.

The DoDI assigns clear responsibilities to the Secretaries of the Military Departments for developing doctrine and operating concepts to help mitigate and respond to civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations and incorporating CHMR objectives into exercises, training, and professional military education. This will facilitate, as one DoD official has stated, “a consistent approach across the department so that this becomes a matter of how we do business.”

Looking forward, consistent with the CHMR-AP, the CHMR DoDI provides direction to identify capability improvements that will improve situational awareness for commanders and their units, including the presence of civilians and civilian objects that may be at risk. Additionally, the CHMR DoDI directs relevant components to provide guidance related to the development and fielding of intelligence sensors and other battlespace awareness capabilities to enable enhanced understanding of civilians and civilian objects throughout the joint targeting process. Likewise, the CHMR DoDI provides direction to leaders of key force development organizations, to identify capability needs for weapons, weapon systems, and other technical systems relevant to CHMR, and identify relevant potential capability improvements that further enable the discriminate use of force in different operational contexts, including by reducing risk to civilians and civilian objects while enabling the same or superior combat effectiveness.

Further, for the first time, the DoDI formalizes in DoD policy a requirement to assess civilian harm resulting from military operations and standardizes civilian harm assessment processes across DoD. It articulates the respective purposes of initial reviews, civilian harm assessments, and investigations. It also provides guidance on the content of those mechanisms and requires that assessments and investigations into civilian harm are conducted in a timely matter and archived in a common data platform that is now being developed by the Department of the Army. These changes will improve the quality of our assessments, enhance our ability to understand the causes of civilian harm, and enable us to continuously improve (because we are learning).

Concluding Thoughts

These documents and our broader CHMR efforts are fostering the development of mutually reinforcing processes and systems that will continually be improved. We envision new policies being implemented, lessons being learned from their implementation, and those lessons feeding back into refinements in training and policy.

Importantly, an integral part of our work on this issue is sharing best practices with international partners and learning from each other’s experiences and policies. Together with our counterparts from the Dutch Ministry of Defense, DoD is working to expand and lead an International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response that allows international partners to meet, share expert views, and discuss challenges faced when seeking to minimize civilian harm, and, importantly, to discuss ways to overcome those challenges. To that end, the United States is working hard so that the EWIPA Declaration can be a framework under which States, in a collaborative spirit, exchange good practices for mitigating and responding to civilian harm. The United States hopes to share our practices and lessons learned, and we also hope to learn from the experiences, lessons, and practices of other States.

The United States is, therefore, meeting its commitments under the EWIPA Declaration and serving as a leader in the international community on issues related to CHMR. And this process is ongoing. CHMR-AP implementation will continue into the next fiscal year and that process will bring additional institutional and policy innovations that will further enhance our overall CHMR approach. With these efforts, including the work of the International Contact Group, the United States will certainly have much progress to report in 2025, when it is anticipated that Costa Rica will host the next conference on the EWIPA Declaration.

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Dan E. Stigall is the Director for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) Policy in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism, Special Operations & Low-Intensity Conflict, OSD (Policy). Any opinion expressed is solely that of the author.

Photo credit: Corporal Mark Larner RY/MOD