Software-driven targeting has fundamentally reshaped the tempo and scale of American and Israeli military operations, enabling both countries to generate and strike targets at a pace that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. A European general who has observed the technology firsthand has described the transformation in stark terms.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing The Economist's investigation, the shift is driven primarily by the Maven Smart System, built largely by Palantir, which fuses open-source data, satellite imagery, signals intelligence and social-media feeds into a single operational picture. The system generates targets, recommends the best weapon for each strike and assesses damage afterward.
The numbers paint a dramatic picture. The European general called what he witnessed "alchemy" and said the shift was from "ten targets a day to 300," with an aspiration of reaching 3,000 daily. Joe O'Callaghan, a retired colonel who led Maven's development at the US Army's XVIII Airborne Corps, disclosed on a recent podcast that a classified study showed Palantir's system could plan an Iraq-scale operation with one-tenth of the manpower previously required.
A former NATO general involved with Maven put the efficiency gain in more concrete terms: what previously demanded dozens of people and tens of hours could now be compressed to two minutes. The system also functions as a "digital twin" of the real world, allowing commanders to simulate the consequences of their decisions before executing them. Arnel David, the NATO officer overseeing the program, has described the goal as transforming military command into a "machine-aided, predictive science."
The gains in speed and efficiency have not come without cost. The February 28 strike on a school in Minab that killed 175 people - later attributed to a targeting mistake - underscored just how dangerous the gap between machine output and human verification has become. As the volume of computer-generated targets grows, the challenge of catching such errors only intensifies - raising questions about whether lessons from Ukraine have been absorbed quickly enough.
Also read: "We Don't Care What Happens Next": Cochrane Lays Out America's New War Doctrine.