How Targeting Actually Works

The Floor

Geoffrey Corn spent years as a military lawyer advising targeting decisions. When asked how commanders weigh a military target against expected civilian casualties, he gave an answer that surprises most people: “There’s no benchmark. And there’s nothing in the law or doctrine, like a table you could open up — a tank is worth two civilian casualties, or a command post is worth five.”¹

There is no formula. There is, instead, a system — the most elaborate civilian protection architecture any military has ever constructed. It does not always work. When it fails, people die in ways that are documented, investigated, and insufficiently punished. But understanding how it works — and how it compares to the alternative — is essential to understanding what happened at Minab, and what will happen at the next school built next to a military base.

The Six Phases

The US military targeting process follows Joint Publication 3-60 — a six-phase cycle that governs every strike from a deliberate campaign plan to a time-sensitive engagement.²

Phase 1: Commander’s Objectives. The Joint Force Commander establishes what the operation must achieve. Doctrine calls this “the most important and first activity of joint targeting because they document the set of outcomes relevant to the present situation.”

Phase 2: Target Development. Intelligence analysts characterize potential targets through all-source fusion — satellite imagery (no older than ninety days), signals intelligence from the NSA, human intelligence, weapons signatures analysis, and open-source data on population density and civilian infrastructure. Targets are evaluated for function, criticality, and vulnerability.

Phase 3: Capabilities Analysis. Weaponeering — matching specific weapons to targets to achieve the desired effect with minimum collateral harm. A Small Diameter Bomb with a 1–3 meter accuracy and reduced blast radius may be chosen over a 2,000-pound JDAM specifically because fewer civilians are within range.

Phase 4: Commander’s Decision. Options are presented with legal assessment, collateral damage estimates, and risk analysis. The commander decides.

Phase 5: Mission Planning and Execution. For time-sensitive targets, this compresses into the F2T2EA kill chain: Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess.

Phase 6: Combat Assessment. Battle Damage Assessment, Collateral Damage Assessment, Munitions Effectiveness Assessment. Results feed back into Phase 1 — the cycle is continuous.

The Bug Splat

The Collateral Damage Estimation methodology — governed by CJCSI 3160.01C — is the system’s core analytical engine. It operates in five escalating levels, each progressively more detailed when civilian risk cannot be resolved at a lower tier.³

Level 1: Are there any No-Strike entities or collateral objects near the target? If none exist, the assessment resolves as LOW.

Level 2: Pre-computed Collateral Effects Radius values. If collateral concerns exist, engagement is restricted to precision-guided munitions.

Level 3: Detailed weaponeering analysis — evaluating fragmentation, blast overpressure, crater ejecta, penetration, and thermal effects against identified collateral concerns.

Level 4: Advanced mitigation techniques — delay fuzing, heading restrictions, platform-specific engagement parameters to direct the blast away from civilian structures.

Level 5: The “bug splat” — a numeric casualty estimate based on the percentage of collateral concerns affected by the Computed Collateral Hazard Area, cross-referenced with population density data. This generates a specific number: the expected civilian dead.

That number determines who can authorize the strike. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, strikes expected to cause thirty or more civilian casualties required approval from the Secretary of Defense or the President. Permission was sought and granted more than fifty times. In Afghanistan, the threshold dropped to near-zero after public outrage over civilian deaths.⁴

One trigger is automatic: if involuntary or unwitting human shields are present — including children near a military facility — the target escalates to Level 5 regardless of other factors. A school next to a military base is, by definition, a Level 5 problem.

The No-Strike List

The military maintains two lists that constrain targeting.⁵

The No-Strike List designates entities upon which kinetic operations are prohibited. Category I — the most sensitive — includes diplomatic offices, religious and cultural institutions, medical facilities, schools, refugee camps, detention facilities, water treatment infrastructure, and dams. Category II includes civilian housing, public utilities, agricultural storage, and facilities that could release toxic chemicals.

The Restricted Target List identifies targets that may be engaged only under specific conditions — nighttime restrictions, mandatory precision-guided munitions, limitations on total destruction, or elevated approval authority.

Geographic combatant commanders maintain these lists through the Modernized Integrated Database. The Kunduz hospital’s coordinates had been shared four days before it was struck — the information existed in the system and was not transmitted to the crew.

The Lawyer on the Floor

JAG officers do not review targeting decisions from distant offices. They sit on the operations center floor alongside targeteers, watching the same screens, hearing the same radio traffic. For deliberate targeting, they sit on the Joint Targeting Board weeks or months before strikes. For dynamic targeting, they staff strike cells operating twenty-four hours a day.⁶

Their role is formally advisory — commanders make the final decision. In practice, a commander who proceeds against legal counsel that a strike would be unlawful faces personal criminal liability under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and international law. JAGs can escalate concerns up the chain of command.

The three principles they enforce — distinction, proportionality, and precaution — translate into operational constraints. Distinction means Positive Identification: “reasonable certainty” that a target is a legitimate military objective. Proportionality means the CDE analysis. Precaution means weapon selection, timing restrictions, aimpoint adjustment, and advance warnings when feasible.⁷

In October 2001, a CENTCOM JAG officer blocked an attack on a convoy carrying Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. During the Kosovo campaign, lawyers played what Columbia’s Richard Betts described as a “remarkably direct role in managing combat operations,” effectively becoming “tactical commanders.”

In 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the top three service JAGs. He described military lawyers as “roadblocks” and derided “stupid rules of engagement.” Multiple current JAGs told CNN they are “increasingly nervous about vocalizing their independent legal opinions because they’re worried about getting fired.”⁸

When It Failed

The system’s failures are not theoretical. They are specific, documented, and devastating.

Kunduz, October 3, 2015. An AC-130 gunship repeatedly struck a Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital for approximately one hour. Forty-two people were killed — twenty-four patients, fourteen MSF staff, four caretakers. Patients burned in their beds. Staff were decapitated. Others were shot from the air while fleeing. The gunship had targeted the wrong building — the intended target was 450 meters away. The crew launched sixty-nine minutes early, bypassing standard mission briefing. MSF had provided GPS coordinates four days earlier. The attack continued for thirty minutes after MSF notified US officials in Kabul and Washington. Sixteen personnel received administrative discipline. No criminal charges were filed. The ninety-two-bed hospital — the only trauma center in northeastern Afghanistan — was destroyed and never rebuilt.⁹

Baghuz, March 18, 2019. F-15E jets dropped a 500-pound bomb on a large group of people, followed by a 2,000-pound bomb on survivors. Approximately eighty were killed, including up to sixty-four women and children. The strike was called in by a classified special operations cell that reportedly killed and wounded Syrian civilians at ten times the rate of similar units. US drone operators at Al-Udeid Air Base identified the crowd as civilians on high-definition cameras — but the task force conducting the strike used only standard-definition cameras and lacked access to the higher-resolution feed. An Air Force legal officer immediately flagged the strike as a possible war crime. The blast site was bulldozed. The strike was concealed for two and a half years. A civilian DIA analyst who assessed the war crime allegation as “extremely credible” was forced from his position. The Pentagon concluded no violations occurred. No personnel were held accountable.¹⁰

Kabul, August 29, 2021. A Reaper drone fired a Hellfire missile at a white Toyota Corolla in a residential neighborhood. Ten civilians were killed — all innocent. Seven were children. The target was Zemari Ahmadi, a forty-three-year-old electrical engineer who worked for a California-based aid organization. His laptop bag was interpreted as explosives. His errands were interpreted as surveillance evasion. His family home was identified as an ISIS safe house. General Mark Milley initially called it a “righteous strike.” The investigation found no wrongdoing and recommended no disciplinary action.¹¹

These failures are real. They are inexcusable on their own terms. They demand accountability that has not been adequately provided.

And they are documented — investigated, reported, debated in Congress, covered by a free press, challenged by organizations like Airwars and the Center for Civilians in Conflict. The New York Times visited 103 airstrike sites in northern Iraq and found that one in five strikes resulted in civilian casualties — a rate the military’s own data obscured by a factor of thirty.¹²

The Comparison

Now consider the alternative.

The IRGC has no known Collateral Damage Estimation methodology. No No-Strike List. No JAG officer embedded in targeting decisions. No post-strike civilian casualty assessment. No engagement with external monitoring organizations. No acknowledgment of any civilian death, ever.¹³

Russia denied causing any civilian casualties in Syria while Airwars documented 4,308 to 6,386 killed — including over a thousand children. Physicians for Human Rights recorded at least 583 attacks on medical facilities. Eight hospitals in Idlib whose GPS coordinates were shared through the UN deconfliction mechanism were deliberately bombed — the coordinates meant to prevent accidental bombing became targeting data. Syrian doctors stopped sharing their locations.¹⁴

At the Mariupol Drama Theater, the word “CHILDREN” was written in large letters visible from the air. A Russian airstrike killed an estimated 600 civilians sheltering inside.¹⁵

Dimension	United States	Russia	Iran/Proxies
CDE equivalent	5-level methodology, certified analysts	None known; denies all civilian harm	None known
Legal review	JAG embedded in targeting loop	No evidence of equivalent	No transparency
No-Strike List	Comprehensive, categorized	Hospitals deliberately targeted	Not applicable
Post-strike assessment	CCAT, investigations, NGO engagement	None; denies everything	None
Civilian deaths acknowledged	~1,417 (anti-ISIS); significant undercount	Zero (Syria)	Not applicable

The US system is imperfect. The 6:1 to 8:1 gap between Pentagon-acknowledged deaths and independent monitoring estimates for the anti-ISIS campaign alone is a measure of that imperfection. Larry Lewis — who analyzed over 2,000 real-world cases of civilian harm — warned that the CDE process can create a “bureaucratic illusion of precision” when not faithfully applied.¹⁶

But the asymmetry is not between the US system and perfection. It is between the US system and systems that have no civilian protection architecture at all — or systems that deliberately maximize civilian exposure for propaganda value.

An Air Force officer described the core distinction: “The term ‘precision’ does not imply accuracy. Instead, the word precision exclusively pertains to a discriminate targeting process.” The process exists. Nothing comparable exists on the other side.¹⁷

The Transparency Paradox

The military that documents its civilian casualties most thoroughly generates the most detailed record for scrutiny and criticism. The military that documents nothing appears clean.¹⁸

Among anti-ISIS coalition partners, no member besides the United States admitted to killing a single civilian in over two years of operations. Lewis argues that transparency and civilian harm mitigation serve as a “strategic offset” — reducing adversaries’ information operation arsenals and strengthening alliances.

The regime that accuses the United States of killing children at Minab has never acknowledged killing a single civilian in any crackdown, any protest, any military operation — despite documentation of thousands of deaths by every major human rights organization on earth.

If you have ever wondered why one country’s civilian casualty numbers appear in headlines while another’s do not — the answer is not that one country kills more civilians. It is that one country built a system to count its failures, and the other built a system to ensure its failures are never counted at all.

This article is part of The Dead Children Calculus. For the regime’s record of deception, see The Credibility Ledger. For the game theory of looking away, see The Price of Looking Away.

Geoffrey Corn, former military lawyer, on the proportionality assessment. No mathematical formula exists for weighing military objectives against civilian risk. ↩
Joint Publication 3-60: Joint Targeting. Six-phase cycle governing all US military targeting operations. ↩
CJCSI 3160.01C: Collateral Damage Estimation methodology. Five escalating levels from basic proximity checks to numerical casualty estimation. ↩
Non-Combatant Casualty Cut-off Value: 30+ civilian casualties required SecDef/Presidential approval during 2003 Iraq invasion. Threshold near-zero in Afghanistan. ↩
No-Strike List (Category I and II) and Restricted Target List maintained by geographic combatant commanders through Modernized Integrated Database. ↩
JAG officers physically embedded in targeting operations. Todd Huntley quote on presence requirement. 24/7 strike cell staffing for dynamic targeting. ↩
Three IHL principles operationalized: Distinction (PID), Proportionality (CDE), Precaution (weaponeering, timing, aimpoint, warnings). ↩
Hegseth fired top three service JAGs (2025). “Roadblocks” and “stupid rules of engagement” characterization. JAGs “increasingly nervous” per CNN reporting. ↩
Kunduz MSF hospital: 42 killed, wrong building, 69 minutes early, 30 minutes after notification, 16 administrative discipline actions, zero criminal charges. Source: MSF, Pentagon review. ↩
Baghuz: ~80 killed including ~64 women and children. Task Force 9 / “Talon Anvil.” Concealed 2.5 years. DIA analyst Gene Tate: “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.” Source: NYT investigation (November 2021). ↩
Kabul: 10 civilians killed including 7 children. Zemari Ahmadi, aid worker. Confirmation bias at every stage. Milley “righteous strike.” No disciplinary action. Source: Pentagon IG review. ↩
NYT investigation: 103 airstrike sites visited in northern Iraq. 1 in 5 strikes caused civilian casualties. Children killed or injured in 62% of visited strikes vs. 27% in military documents. ↩
IRGC: no CDE, no NSL, no JAG equivalent, no post-strike assessment, no civilian casualty acknowledgment. AP documented coordinated hospital raids across multiple cities; regime official confirmed systematic execution of wounded on treatment beds. ↩
Russia in Syria: 4,308-6,386 civilians killed (Airwars), 583+ attacks on medical facilities (PHR). 8 Idlib hospitals bombed after GPS coordinates shared via UN deconfliction. Source: SNHR, Airwars, PHR. ↩
Mariupol Drama Theater: “CHILDREN” written outside, ~600 killed in Russian airstrike. Bucha: 458 bodies with execution evidence. Sources: AP, UN documentation. ↩
Pentagon vs. independent estimates: ~1,417 acknowledged vs. minimum 8,300 documented (anti-ISIS). Larry Lewis: CDE methodology “never been calibrated with real-world data.” “Bureaucratic illusion of precision.” ↩
Air Force officer on precision: “pertains to a discriminate targeting process.” The process is the distinction, not the weapon accuracy. ↩
Transparency paradox: no coalition partner besides the US admitted a single civilian death. Lewis: transparency as “strategic offset.” ↩