Vox Sentences - DoD's plan to limit civilian casualties

Defense Chief Lloyd Austin says the military will improve its approach to civilian casualties; 10 billion vaccine doses have been administered, but severe access inequity remains. 

Tonight's Sentences was written by Ellen Ioanes.

The US military knows it has a civilian casualty problem

Hoshang Hashimi / AFP via Getty Images

• In a memo this week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to address multiple findings of civilian casualties in US combat zones, most recently the death of civilians, including an aid worker and children, targeted by a drone strike during the fall of Kabul. [New York Times / Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Azmat Khan]
• The two-page memo broadly addresses high-level changes in response to recent reports and investigative journalism on civilian casualties caused by US military action. [Department of Defense]
• The memo focuses on institutional changes, like creating a “civilian protection center of excellence” to improve knowledge-sharing, as well as improvements to spotty reporting and data collection and reviewing the Pentagon’s policies on addressing civilian harms. [The Hill / Ellen Mitchell]
• But these directives don’t directly address how the military plans to mitigate civilian casualties, including death, injury, and destruction of property —they're more about how the Pentagon will deal with casualties after the fact. However, the memo does call for the completion of a plan within six months  on strategies to limit such casualties. [Department of Defense]
• Reporting suggests that Austin intends to put a high-level defense official in charge of a new strategy on civilian casualties. Austin’s directive is not limited to just casualties from outright violence, but also from other forms of conflict, like misinformation and hacking of critical infrastructure. [NYT / Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Azmat Khan]
• A number of reports, including by the New York Times and a recent report by the RAND Corporation, show that the Pentagon’s reporting and data collection mechanisms for tracking civilian casualties are disastrous.  Congress has put restrictions on some defense funding in response, though it's not clear how much effect that may have. [NYT / Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Azmat Khan]

The 10 billion vaccine dose milestone

• On Friday, the world reached a milestone of 10 billion vaccine doses administered globally since the first were given in late 2020. But although that’s enough for everyone in the world to have gotten at least one dose, inequity continues to plague the vaccine distribution process. [New York Times / Shashank Bengali]
• High-income countries like the US and many European nations have vaccination rates in the 60 to 70 percent range, with some, like Portugal, even higher. Although the wealthiest 107 countries in the world contain 54 percent of the earth’s population, they’ve received 71 percent of vaccines given. [Bloomberg / Drew Armstrong]
• But in poor nations vaccination rates are dismal; only about 9.8 percent of people in poor nations have received at least one dose. That statistic seems to be acutely felt in Africa, which has received only 6 percent of vaccine doses. [Brookings / Michel Sidibé]
• The Covax vaccine-sharing initiative was supposed to ensure increased access to Covid-19 vaccines for poorer countries. After a burst of recent progress, Covax now says it can’t receive any new doses because it’s run out of funding for essential supplies like syringes. [FT / Donato Paolo Mancini]
• Largely due to vaccine inequity, many nations aren’t on track meet the World Health Organization’s goal to have 70 percent of the population inoculated by the middle of the year. Low vaccination rates likely mean we’ll continue to see more mutations and virus variants. [CNBC / Holly Ellyatt]

A federal judge has thrown out an oil lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the Biden administration hadn’t properly analyzed the greenhouse gas emissions impact of developing the 80 million acres for fuel production. [NYT / Lisa Friedman]

• The Department of Homeland Security is planning for as many as 9,000 migrant arrests per day at the US-Mexico border by this spring, outpacing last year’s average of about 6,500 arrests per day. [Reuters / Ted Hesson]
• Italy still doesn’t have a president, even after four days of parliamentary votes. [AP]
• Forty percent of people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region are suffering from “extreme lack of food” due to the impacts of nearly 15 months of civil war, according to the World Food Programme. [Al Jazeera]

What’s the four-letter name of the band that performed “Highway to Hell”?

Solve today's new Vox crossword puzzle, and stay tuned for more puzzles coming out Monday through Saturday.

“We saw today. When a bridge is in disrepair, it literally can threaten lives.”

[President Biden, giving a previously scheduled speech about infrastructure in Pittsburgh — just hours after a bridge collapsed in the city, injuring several people]

The US is negotiating to stop Russia from invading Ukraine, but a Germany-backed natural gas project complicates things. [Spotify]

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