Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke about military accountability as it pertains to two drone strikes that resulted in civilian casualties, though the Department of Defense has not publicly released any consequences for those involved.
The DOD acknowledged responsibility this week for a March 18, 2019, drone strike in Syria that killed 80 people, some of whom were civilians, and the admission comes two months after it also revealed that the target of an Aug. 29, 2021, drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, was a case of mistaken identity. Ten civilians, including seven children, were killed in that strike.
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“I believe that leaders in this department should be held to account for high standards of conduct and leadership, and that’s who we are. And I believe that our troops understand that,” Austin told reporters on Wednesday.
“I have every intent to uphold that standard,” he added. “Again, when we have a civilian casualty, we investigate that by standard procedure, and again, we’ll look at policies and procedures and make sure that we’re as tight as possible going forward.”
The Aug. 29 drone strike targeted Zemari Ahmadi, an Afghan aid worker, and the DOD has since acknowledged that he had no terrorist ties and did not pose a threat to U.S. interests. It occurred just days after an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members, at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the final days of the U.S. military’s war in Afghanistan and its chaotic evacuation efforts.
Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, the U.S. Air Force’s inspector general, investigated the strike and concluded there were no illegalities with the strike, and Austin has signed off on it.
He has issued recommendations to Austin about how to prevent similar events from occurring in the future, and one of them was the need to eliminate confirmation bias in the gathering of intelligence.
“One of the recommendations that goes to this issue, central to this issue, is red teaming, if you will, to break confirmation bias by somebody going, ‘You can interpret the intelligence in a way that leads you to further believe that this is the vehicle of interest, but you can also interpret it as benign,’” Said told reporters earlier this month. “There were instances where the intelligence was being correlated to real-time information or what was being observed in a way that we could have had a chance to inject and go, ‘What else could this be? I know you could interpret it this way, but what about this?’”
Austin tasked U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command to “come back [to] me with their plans for how to implement Gen. Said’s findings and recommendations, and they’ve done that. And I’m working my way through their recommendations.”
Austin had Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of CENTCOM, brief him on the March 18, 2019, drone strike outside of Baghuz in Syria on Tuesday, days after the New York Times reported on the strike, which hadn’t been publicly revealed.
CENTCOM, which oversaw the aerial war campaign in Syria, acknowledged that 80 people were killed in the strike, saying that 16 of them were fighters and four were civilians, but it was unclear the status of the other 60 people.
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Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general, told the New York Times that “leadership just seemed so set on burying this,” and he admitted, “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”
