The Pentagon's primary targeting engine for the war in Iran - the Maven Smart System, built largely by Palantir - has proven capable of compressing vast military planning operations into a fraction of the time and manpower they once required, according to a recently disclosed classified study.

As "Hvylya" reports, citing a detailed investigation by The Economist, retired Colonel Joe O'Callaghan, who led Maven's development at the US Army's XVIII Airborne Corps, revealed on a podcast that the system allowed military staff to plan an operation on the scale of the Iraq War with one-tenth of the manpower. He added that the capability has since improved further.

Maven works by fusing data from multiple streams - open sources like social-media feeds alongside classified inputs from satellites and signals intelligence. In one illustrative scenario, if an Iranian mentions on Telegram that a missile launcher passed their house, Maven can correlate that snippet with radio-frequency satellite data detecting electronic emissions from military radios. From there, it can generate a target, recommend the optimal weapon and assess post-strike damage.

The system has been operational since at least 2022, when it was first deployed in support of Ukraine. It now serves as the backbone of CENTCOM's operations in Iran, where the industrial process of generating strikes is run by humans at the command's headquarters in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM's intelligence directorate maintains a database of thousands of potential targets assembled from satellite imagery, signals intelligence and other sources - along with "no strike" lists of schools, hospitals and protected sites.

A "weaponeer" then matches munitions to targets - bunker-busters for buried facilities, GPS-guided JDAMs for buildings. The command's strategy directorate assembles these into a war plan, which the operations team breaks down into air tasking orders that typically look two days ahead. Maven has supercharged every stage of this pipeline, but the surge in volume has raised urgent questions about whether human oversight can keep pace with the machine's output - particularly given warnings about munition sustainability as the campaign stretches on.

Also read: One Million Armed Men: Why Petraeus Says Regime Change in Iran Won't Come From the Air.