The US military's AI-driven targeting infrastructure has undergone a dramatic expansion. With the help of Project Maven's computer vision, American forces went from hitting under a hundred targets a day to a thousand. After large language models were integrated into the Maven platform, that number rose fivefold - to 5,000 targets daily, according to officials at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The figures come from an in-depth investigation by WIRED, based on a book excerpt by journalist Katrina Manson who spent years reporting on Project Maven's evolution from a controversial Pentagon experiment into the US military's primary AI targeting platform, "Hvylya" reports.

The speed gains are equally striking. A single targeting cell can now go from detecting a target to striking it within minutes - down from hours before Maven. At US Central Command, which oversees operations across the Middle East, 179 different live data feeds from land, sea, air, space, and cyber pour into the Maven Smart System built by Palantir. The platform can identify available weapons, calculate flying time, assess loading details, and locate nearby personnel and partners.

Brigadier General John Cogbill, CENTCOM's deputy director of operations, was blunt about the advantage: "Shortening kill chains is universally good." Operators click through Maven's Target Workbench to approve or disapprove targets, sequence them by priority, and send orders directly to weapons systems.

Joe O'Callaghan, NGA's director of AI mission, insisted that commanders across the military now rely on the AI. "Every commander is using the AI, bottom line," he said. "You'll hear some people push back, but when you ask them what they're looking at on screen, it's the AI."

Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, who oversaw Maven's expansion at NGA, confirmed that the technology's most serious users go straight to AI-driven target development. By the time of his retirement in November 2025, NGA's computer vision models were detecting objects nearly five times faster than before, with AI detections numbering in the billions.

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