LONDON, March 12. /TASS/. In the first 4 days of the operation against Iran, the United States carried out 2,000 strikes, as many as in the first 6 months of the campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, banned in Russia) in Iraq and Syria, the Financial Times reported in an article dedicated to how artificial intelligence is changing the decision-making chain in the US armed forces.
"If we look at the campaign against Isis, the coalition struck around 2,000 targets in the first six months of the campaign in Iraq and Syria," Jessica Dorsey, a researcher on the use of AI and international humanitarian law at Utrecht University, stated. "Now compare that with reports about this campaign, where the same numbers of strikes [by the US] occurred within just the first four days. That illustrates the scale and speed of target execution."
According to her, targets for strikes in current conflicts "could have existed beforehand," but it cannot be ruled out that they "could have been generated quickly by AI systems." In the context of the strike on the school in Minab, this causes "a serious concern about how carefully these have been vetted as required by law."
On February 28, Iranian authorities reported that the US and Israel had struck an elementary school for girls in the city of Minab in the south of the country. According to the latest data, 175 people died: mostly students, as well as parents and teachers. Another 95 people were injured. US President Donald Trump later blamed the Iranian armed forces for the attack without providing evidence. It was later discovered that missile fragments found at the strike site were marked as US munitions.
On March 5, The Washington Post (WP) reported, citing sources, that the US military used the Maven Smart System digital air traffic control platform, based on the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model, to select targets in planning the operation against Iran. The AI tools evaluate a strike after it is initiated. One of the newspaper’s sources noted that AI allowed the military to increase the pace of combat operations.