Iran So Far Away: 2026

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Such a lovely country. It'd be a shame if Iran and Israel wiped each other off the map.

And by shame, I obviously mean "No More Tears".

 

[Kepler]

Good explanation of why we murdered those school children. TLDR: because we were in a hurry and used AI and skipped checks and didn't give a shit about the human cost cuz hurr hurr "enemies":

Before this generation of AI tools, US strike planning ran on a mature, industrial process.

It wasn’t fast, but that was kind of the point: it was built with intentional friction, because friction catches mistakes.

Here’s the simplified kill chain as it existed before AI targeting entered the picture.

Collection and processing came first. Satellites, airborne ISR platforms, SIGINT intercepts, human intelligence reporting, partner nation feeds… all of it flowing into processing cells where DIA analysts sitting in over 140 locations globally, including in Reston, Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, Frederick, Maryland, and Huntsville, Alabama tried to make sense of an ocean of raw data.

Then analysts built the picture. Humans did the correlation work.

What is that site? What moved since the last satellite pass? What Iranian unit owns it? Is the intelligence still current? Is it collateral-sensitive? Are there civilians nearby?

After that came target development and vetting. Targeteers (yes, that’s their real name. The Joint Targeting School at Dam Neck, Virginia trains personnel specifically in the targeting cycle) built a target folder: essentially a legal and operational dossier for every site on the strike list.

Weaponeers determined what munition achieves the desired effect. Collateral damage estimation ran. Legal reviews happened. ROE checks happened. Protected sites like schools, hospitals, and mosques got flagged and either removed from the target lists or subjected to strict weapon constraints.

Then came prioritization and tasking. Command decided what mattered most, assigned aircraft and weapons, and that became part of the Air Tasking Order cycle.

Finally, execution, assessment, and re-attack decisions are made from battle damage assessments.

From collection to execution, that process could take days. Sometimes weeks for complex targets.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that kind of target identification and vetting work required a team of around 2,000 intelligence analysts.

The system was slow by design. Friction was built in. Friction is annoying. Friction also catches the error where someone forgot to check whether the facility on the 2013 imagery is still a military site.

AI doesn’t replace that structure. It accelerates ALL steps except execution. When AI turns “hours and days” into “seconds or milliseconds,” you risk swapping careful vetting for fast acceptance. That’s the automation-bias trap. CENTCOM is trying to reassure the public that humans still decide yet it doesn’t fully answer whether humans have enough time and context to do more than rubber-stamp.

The Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and powered by Anthropic’s Claude, didn’t replace that targeting structure. It accelerated it, and that distinction is everything.

CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said it out loud in a video posted this week: AI tools “help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can.”

Here’s the architecture: Maven uses computer vision models, not a language model like Claude, to do the heavy detection work.

Computer vision is a different flavor of AI than what you see in the news. You can’t have Maven build you a killer itinerary for your NYC trip. That’s an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built Maven’s foundation around automatically detecting, identifying, characterizing, and tracking objects and features in imagery and video, then feeding those detections into other platforms.

This is the “find the needle in the haystack” layer. Modern ISR generates an ocean of pixels from satellite passes, drone footage, cell phone imagery, and radar returns. No human team can manually process that volume at operational tempo.

Remember those 2,000 intelligence analysts during the 2003 Iraq invasion? In Iran, AI reduced that to about 20 people.

We could have incorporated the AI vision models as another form of data gathering, but kept the 2000 analysts and even hired more, and kept the oversight and the human cost analyses. That would have been valuable. And we likely would have, had not a bunch of brainless psychopaths taken over governance and compliance.

Elections have consequences. Explain to me again why we don't have intelligence tests for the franchise? Stupid people should not have the ability to ruin the lives of smart people.