NATO's armed forces have embraced the Maven Smart System - the same AI-powered platform driving American strikes in Iran - as a central tool for military planning, a shift that senior European officers have described in terms that border on disbelief.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing The Economist, a European general who witnessed Maven in action called the experience "alchemy." The system fuses open-source information, satellite imagery, signals intelligence and social-media data into a unified operational picture, then generates targets, recommends weapons and assesses damage - all at a speed that has stunned observers.
Arnel David, the NATO officer overseeing the Maven program, has described the system as a "digital twin" of the real world that allows commanders to simulate the consequences of their decisions before executing them. The ambition, he wrote, is to transform military command into a "machine-aided, predictive science."
The scale of the efficiency gains has been difficult for traditional military planners to absorb. A former NATO general involved with Maven said that tasks which once required dozens of people and tens of hours could now be completed in two minutes. A retired American colonel who helped develop the system disclosed that a classified study showed it could replicate Iraq-war-scale planning with one-tenth the manpower. Maven was first deployed in support of Ukraine in 2022, and observers have noted that drone warfare lessons from that conflict shaped the system's evolution.
Not all NATO members are comfortable with the pace of change. Some countries are "worried about the loss of human control," according to one person involved with the technology, who added that the alliance is "moving at a pace of change I wouldn't even have understood four years ago." The technology's current role in Iran has made the stakes - and the risks - far more visible, especially as senior military voices caution that the campaign's lessons from Ukraine remain underabsorbed.
Also read: Unexpected Move: Ukraine Offers the US Specialized Help Against Iran.