"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution."
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Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground.
However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting ti war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.
My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself
Targeting a single person which would be a valid target had war been declared, while knowing the strike would kill many civilians, is the same as targeting those civilians.
No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.
The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
Not sure if astonishingly credulous or just pretending.
Iran claims 600 schools have been damaged, with over 1000 students killed. I doubt the veracity of those numbers, but not as much as I doubt the US claims of benign omniscience in targeting and invulnerability from being targeted.
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.
>>I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!).
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
Why? You just saw I got the point without reading it.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
It's almost as if AI's purpose is to shift blame, saying that the 'computer did it', in which case these deliberately unreliable AI systems are used, so that responsibility can be avoided, or smeared across the command chain, so every person was only responsible for an innocious part of the whole disaster.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
>It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution and the US claims that there was a threat of attack on US bases and US interests and therefore the attack was in self defense. The body that decides is the UNSC and given the US has veto powers it's not going to obviously declare the US attack illegal.
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.
If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.
> the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel.
Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.
As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.
At various times, and potentially via proxies:
Iraq
Saudi Arabia
Israel
Kurdish Rebels
The US
“All countries” via actions against shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz
They've colonized the whole region with their proxies, from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq, previously Syria which they attacked with Hezbollah to support the Russia-backed Assad. About 1 million dead people from all this proxy warfare. Lebanon in particular wants to be a normal liberal democracy but their proxy militia assassinates any politician who stands in their way.
You have clearly articulated what I’ve personally explained to people. Thank you for that. The nature of the strikes as a part of a thoroughly pre-planned surprise attack lays the entire blame at the planners, approvers and those who executed the strike.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
The school literally had its own website. If the AI involved was as smart as the media hype machine makes them out to be, it would have found the website and marked it as a non-target. It never even would have made it to human review.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.
It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base.
Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.
Where do you think the children of our armed forces go to school? There are hundreds of schools on or adjacent to military installations in the US. The only people with blood on their hands for bombing a school are the people who bombed the school. It’s really not more complicated than that.
To be fair, we don't really have the capacity to run satellite surveillance on each and every target we select to engage in a sneak attack.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A kind of demonstration of what we can do with the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
Did anyone seriously believe this was the AI's fault? The modern military use of LLMs is very clearly for the purpose of creating vaguely plausible targets while distancing any person from the decision to murder people. Surely if we cared at all about accomplishing a strategic goal we would have had a set of well documented targets ready to go. Instead the goal seems to be to drop as many bombs as possible, hope the computer's good enough that they mostly hit people who have relevance to things we don't like, and loudly proclaim that it's more important to kill people than it is to have any goal at all.
"the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target."
This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
We have a ghazillion incidents- where islamists use kids as human shields. Now the sponsor power of that whole ideological block gets attacked- and im supossed to worry about target selection? Like, you lied, a million times in my face. You used disenfranchised and the trampled of the west as puppets for your islamo-supremacist scheming, like any other empire. And now you get whats coming to you and im supossed to fall, one last ride, for the "puppies in danger". By the same regime, that send thousands of basdisch child soldiers, tied together with ropes, plastic keys to heave, into the mine fields of the shat-el-arab?
Is there anyone out there, giving the time of day at this point?
A similar situation happened a few weeks ago when the US/Israel started targeting Iranian police facilities. They bombed a public park in Tehran called "Police Park" because it has the name "Police" in it. It's a normal park.
If you asked AI to "list the top 100 police facilities in Tehran", this location would appear on the list. It's clear they're using AI to pick targets.
Really fascinating article. Bits of bias here and there, like "The US military has been trying to close the gap between seeing something and destroying it for as long as that gap has existed" -- you can respond to seeing and understanding something without destroying it -- but it underscores, to me at least, how much denser the "fog of war" has become. The fog of media reporting in general. Those first few paragraphs felt like a breath of fresh air.
The US under Trump is behaving exactly like a country with intentions of damaging the Western order and antagonising enemies to open new front lines. I think writing off Trump's actions as stupid is wrong, he's malicious.
Before it was the gods, then God, then Nature, and now AI. Human beings really have a fundamental issue with accepting responsibility for their actions.
From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.
The west should have just used cluster munitions in ballistic missiles. Apparently you can target civilians with those and no one will accuse you of war crimes. Drones hitting residential buildings, airports and critical energy infrastructure? No problem. If you use an F-35 and smart munitions we expect perfect accuracy though.
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
I blame everything on the air force AOC concept and the joint targeting cycle. They are, at their core, an attempt to manage every aspect of a war from one room. It 'works' in peace time when you have exactly 3 real decisions to make a day and a staff of hundreds to orchestrate it but in war it is completely unresponsive, blind because all information comes through the telephone game and bought 100% into the idea that 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail' problem. We have bombs. Let's bomb them. This is why we loose wars.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
I wonder if the coordinates for the school were passed to US intel on purpose to have US deeper entrenched into a war with Iran.. Who would benefit from this?
I 100% believe this was done by somebody inside our administration. It’s totally in character for them. Look at what they do to immigrants and our own citizens. They intentionally target children.
But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.
Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.
Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.
But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.
Not sure how you could live with yourself if you were building software that was used to kill children. I know tools can be used in ways you can't anticipate but if you're actively supporting the military in their use of it which in my eyes makes you responsible.
You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened. Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press.
IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.
Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.
Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.
EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is:
- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.
- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.
- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.
- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.
Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.
And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.
As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
I agree with all of that. My worry is that the Guardian article is not doing any of it, and in fact is damaging the framework for even having such a conversation.. Instead they are repeating IRGC statements without attribution, and establishing them as background truth in the first paragraph. Then building an entire article on that flawed premise. Essentially, their article exists in the narrative universe create by the IRGC. I find that incredibly worrying.
My bar for present day journalists and the Guardian specifically is pretty low. The goal for the Guardian is apparently to get clicks and advance their agenda. Journalism and real news reporting is apparently dead. My commentary is more on the specifics of the incident.
I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.
This is incorrect. The US government (via Secretary Hegseth) has only confirmed that they are investigating the incident.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
> To this day we don't know what actually happened.
I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.
The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.
I think it's likely that the explosion was caused by a US strike. But we don't actually know for sure that that's what happened - the US government has not confirmed it.
We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.
> Have those investigations been launched?
Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.
How long does it take to look at the coordinates programmed into the cruise missiles? Or to review existing satellite imagery for the location and other intelligence sources?
If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying.
I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already.
Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
What have they done to deserve your trust? They started a war that they deny is a war. They told us a year ago they set Iran back a decade. Then they tell us 9 months later they're weeks from a nuclear bomb. I wouldn't trust the warmongers to admit they're child killers.
>> Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known
Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.
I think its fair to treat things that the Trump administration and the Iranian military agree on as facts. If they were distortions that favored one side, we would see pushback from the other. Maybe there are distortions that somehow benefit both of these parties, but it seems unlikely. At minimum, then, this was a school, the Americans bombed it, and children died as a result.
> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
That article is based on anonymous sources ("according to [people] familiar with the preliminary findings").
It doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not an official confirmation by the US government, and it only speaks to the responsibility of the strike, not the various claims of "killed children".
Those sources don't say anything about casualties, or the presence of children. The NYT does its best to make it sound like they do ("responsible for a deadly strike"), but so far the only source for how deadly it is, remains the IRGC. And the NYT happily quotes their claim that the death toll was "at least 175 people".
For what it's worth, I personally believe the US is responsible for the strike. I also think the IRGC is lying about casualties, but there's no way to know for sure, and a US investigation probably won't tell us more on that point.
Isn't it a more reasonable explanation that the IDF deliberately had this school bombed because those schoolgirls were the children of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers?
The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
kakacik's razor - Never attribute to incompetence of IDF/Mosad that which is adequately explained by laser focus intent to murder and exterminate enemy at all costs, via all avenues, all is allowed.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has an updated tally on defensive and offensive munition expenditures. It's likely not 100% accurate due to the sensitive nature of those figures.
> 11,294 munitions in the first 16 days of the conflict, at a cost of approximately $26 billion.
Incidentally, $26B is a sum in the same ballpark as the cost of eradicating homelessness in the US, ending large-scale hunger worldwide or making significant progress towards safe drinking water for all or the eradication of malaria.
It’s a tale as old as time: start a war to support the military industrial complex. Imagine a $4 billion investment into public transportation or parks. Every 10 years we can invest into a new city instead of bombing some kids overseas (whose siblings, fueled by hatred, then commit terror attacks on the west).
So far, they are not funded to do this for that long. They have floated a $200B bill to congress, which made national news coverage. It would start a huge, prolonged fight over the war and actually force them to ask permission from congress to fight it (barring totally disregarding the constitution which is still a possibility).
Unfortunately I can very well imagine several more months and years of this. We are still fighting a forever war that started in 2001. This is all a generation of Americans will know, and that is sad.
Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.
Something that a lot of tech people, especially in Silicon Valley, seem to want to forget, is that at every level you still have people making decisions. AI is suggesting but someone, somewhere, still has to make the decision to act on that suggestion.
The immediate concern isn't really fully autonomous systems, it's that the nature and design of recommender/suggestion systems prompt humans to sleepwalk through their responsibilities.
Are Americans not even aware of their own history? The US carpet bombed the SHIT out of Korea and Vietnam. All it did was convince their enemies to fight.
And then in Afghanistan and Iraq the US terrified of every shadow blew up anything that looked suspicious- again only serving their enemies.
It is all just so damn tiresome and America never learns because it literally cannot go 5 years without starting some unnecessary and ultimately futile conflict.
The school was located adjacent to (or on the border of) an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval compound/base. Evidence (satellite imagery, verified videos, missile fragments consistent with a US Tomahawk cruise missile, and geolocation) shows the area was targeted as part of strikes on that military site
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
Israel and the US are bombing lots of schools and hospitals and civilian infrastructure, this is not the only case. This is intentional genocide, not a software/organizational/human error.
"As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA".
It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"."
This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad.
It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".
But they didn't bomb every school in Gaza. You made that up. One school was even 'bombed' when a PIJ missile landed in its carpark but you made up the IDF doing that, which made you look silly when the hospital was still there in the morning. And MSF openly admit that Hamas was operating out of their hospitals.
> nazi-zionist rhetoric.
Holocaust invertion is when someone equates the idea that Jews should be able to live in their own homeland safely with nazism.
The Israeli state leaders is proudly declaring superiority of their people, the need for vital space (Lebensraum, the great Israel), segregating their own citizens, conducting pogroms, you have all the doctrine there. Go find out where this book played before and how it all ended up.
I am countering the parent's statement that seems to indicate the US and Israel are intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure systematically for no reason. A lot of this infrastructure is targeted for good reason because it is used for military purposes.
This is totally unrelated to the topic where it seems the one school in question was incorrectly targeted based on what we know today (though not intentionally).
The general framework for justifying collateral damage is that enough care has to be taken to minimize it vs. the value of the military objective being achieved. Attacking an IRGC headquarters intentionally based in a school (e.g. if the example in Syria was to be attacked by Israel for example) still needs to pass this test. I.e. Israel would have to take measures to minimize collateral damage which would be proportional to the military value it gains by hitting the IRGC. But the (Syrian) school would have been considered a legitimate military target and the outrage should be towards the IRGC setting up camp there.
Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.
This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.
Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?
The Guardian carrying water for the AI industry. The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile. We get that Maven is Palantir, but it integrates Claude:
Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.
I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.
I assume you actually read the article and didn't just post this after a quick skim, yes? Because saying this:
> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile
Doesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.
The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.
The article you're responding to is making specific operational claims about Claude's (basically non-) relevance. I'd be interested to hear if you're directionally correct, but forgive me if I need more details than "but it integrates Claude".
This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.
Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."
We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.
> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.
We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.
You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.
"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution."
----------------
Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
"it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation."
I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.
It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting ti war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.
our views of the world are probably irreconcilable, and I don't think your comment was written to try to fix that.
My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.
> If you do - how can you? Why would they?
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself
Targeting a single person which would be a valid target had war been declared, while knowing the strike would kill many civilians, is the same as targeting those civilians.
No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
It is possible that two things are true
1. this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
2. Trump and Hegseth are (like) cartoon character villains.
There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.
Given their glee at droning unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, I would argue they are much farther along this axis than you realize.
The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
Nobody deliberately produces propaganda for their enemies. The people involved may be evil and stupid, but nobody is that evil and stupid.
Not sure if astonishingly credulous or just pretending. Iran claims 600 schools have been damaged, with over 1000 students killed. I doubt the veracity of those numbers, but not as much as I doubt the US claims of benign omniscience in targeting and invulnerability from being targeted.
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
What if the enemy sets up hopsitals and schools on military bases?
How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed?
Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
Group A also include starting a war for bad reasons and then "accidentally" killing school children as a result.
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
> How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years?
The regime just murdered around ten thousand Iranian protesters, most of them pretty young. You going to just ignore that?
I don't think they did, and anyway you're just trying to redirect to a different question.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.
>>I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!).
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
It seems these targets get reviewed and excluded if they are no longer targets. To me, it looks like someone was not paying attention for ten yrs.
Wouldn't have been looking for targets if senile old fucks looking to deflect from their personal liabilities hadn't started shooting.
AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation.
You all are falling for propaganda.
That is actually the point of the article, if you had read it
Why? You just saw I got the point without reading it.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
It's almost as if AI's purpose is to shift blame, saying that the 'computer did it', in which case these deliberately unreliable AI systems are used, so that responsibility can be avoided, or smeared across the command chain, so every person was only responsible for an innocious part of the whole disaster.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
I'm sure it's a comfort to the parents and families of 150 dead kids that this is actually a very low error rate.
What are you doing?
The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
>It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
Well, but this is irrelevant. You can't possibly say 'listen, the richest army on Earth does not have the means to prevent bombing a school'
To anyone responding to this be aware that this is one of the worst zionists we have on this website.
Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution and the US claims that there was a threat of attack on US bases and US interests and therefore the attack was in self defense. The body that decides is the UNSC and given the US has veto powers it's not going to obviously declare the US attack illegal.
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
> the US claims that there was a threat of attack
What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.
If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.
> the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel.
Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.
As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.
>Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution
On who?
At various times, and potentially via proxies: Iraq Saudi Arabia Israel Kurdish Rebels The US “All countries” via actions against shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz
They've colonized the whole region with their proxies, from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq, previously Syria which they attacked with Hezbollah to support the Russia-backed Assad. About 1 million dead people from all this proxy warfare. Lebanon in particular wants to be a normal liberal democracy but their proxy militia assassinates any politician who stands in their way.
How many dead from the US's proxy wars?
You have clearly articulated what I’ve personally explained to people. Thank you for that. The nature of the strikes as a part of a thoroughly pre-planned surprise attack lays the entire blame at the planners, approvers and those who executed the strike.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?
https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlh...
I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
The school literally had its own website. If the AI involved was as smart as the media hype machine makes them out to be, it would have found the website and marked it as a non-target. It never even would have made it to human review.
In this case, they would have discovered it was a school with a Google search, basically. There’s no excuse.
I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.
That's a non excuse.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.
It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base. Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.
Where do you think the children of our armed forces go to school? There are hundreds of schools on or adjacent to military installations in the US. The only people with blood on their hands for bombing a school are the people who bombed the school. It’s really not more complicated than that.
Or the vast satellite network we run. Pretty easy to see it's school children going in and out of the area.
To be fair, we don't really have the capacity to run satellite surveillance on each and every target we select to engage in a sneak attack.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A kind of demonstration of what we can do with the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
Did anyone seriously believe this was the AI's fault? The modern military use of LLMs is very clearly for the purpose of creating vaguely plausible targets while distancing any person from the decision to murder people. Surely if we cared at all about accomplishing a strategic goal we would have had a set of well documented targets ready to go. Instead the goal seems to be to drop as many bombs as possible, hope the computer's good enough that they mostly hit people who have relevance to things we don't like, and loudly proclaim that it's more important to kill people than it is to have any goal at all.
"the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target."
This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.
It's definitely been reported before that Claude was used for Iran attacks, at the beginning of March or earlier:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/01/claude-an...
Edit: Also, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
"The U.S. used Anthropic's Claude to support Operation Epic Fury against Iran yesterday, sources familiar with the Pentagon's operations tell Axios."
OK. The US probably also used telephones and Diet Coke.
Nothing cited said that Claude was selecting targets or informing target selection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
I have heard the claim everywhere.
there is a lot of confusion about all this stuff
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
We have a ghazillion incidents- where islamists use kids as human shields. Now the sponsor power of that whole ideological block gets attacked- and im supossed to worry about target selection? Like, you lied, a million times in my face. You used disenfranchised and the trampled of the west as puppets for your islamo-supremacist scheming, like any other empire. And now you get whats coming to you and im supossed to fall, one last ride, for the "puppies in danger". By the same regime, that send thousands of basdisch child soldiers, tied together with ropes, plastic keys to heave, into the mine fields of the shat-el-arab? Is there anyone out there, giving the time of day at this point?
Worth mentioning that the author wrote about this first on his substack: https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain
A similar situation happened a few weeks ago when the US/Israel started targeting Iranian police facilities. They bombed a public park in Tehran called "Police Park" because it has the name "Police" in it. It's a normal park.
https://x.com/clashreport/status/2029574288253026510 https://x.com/tparsi/status/2029555364262228454
If you asked AI to "list the top 100 police facilities in Tehran", this location would appear on the list. It's clear they're using AI to pick targets.
Man, you've really cracked this one. They bombed a place because it has the word "police" in it.
The US is a morally and ethically bankrupt country, that's why something like this happens. Not the first time either[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing
Time for a massive boycott to all US-American products? Or what else will stop the thugs?
Really fascinating article. Bits of bias here and there, like "The US military has been trying to close the gap between seeing something and destroying it for as long as that gap has existed" -- you can respond to seeing and understanding something without destroying it -- but it underscores, to me at least, how much denser the "fog of war" has become. The fog of media reporting in general. Those first few paragraphs felt like a breath of fresh air.
The US under Trump is behaving exactly like a country with intentions of damaging the Western order and antagonising enemies to open new front lines. I think writing off Trump's actions as stupid is wrong, he's malicious.
Interesting article. Seems like AI-washing isn't just for layoffs anymore.
What AI does best is remove accountability and ownership
Makes one think why Mckinsey et. al. are doing poorly ;)
Before it was the gods, then God, then Nature, and now AI. Human beings really have a fundamental issue with accepting responsibility for their actions.
From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.
The west should have just used cluster munitions in ballistic missiles. Apparently you can target civilians with those and no one will accuse you of war crimes. Drones hitting residential buildings, airports and critical energy infrastructure? No problem. If you use an F-35 and smart munitions we expect perfect accuracy though.
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
Its not a war crime if the AI does it?
I blame everything on the air force AOC concept and the joint targeting cycle. They are, at their core, an attempt to manage every aspect of a war from one room. It 'works' in peace time when you have exactly 3 real decisions to make a day and a staff of hundreds to orchestrate it but in war it is completely unresponsive, blind because all information comes through the telephone game and bought 100% into the idea that 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail' problem. We have bombs. Let's bomb them. This is why we loose wars.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
It’s well known that US doesn’t commit war crimes, they just make mistakes.
When AI gets something wrong, it's the operator's fault, IMO.
I wonder if the coordinates for the school were passed to US intel on purpose to have US deeper entrenched into a war with Iran.. Who would benefit from this?
I 100% believe this was done by somebody inside our administration. It’s totally in character for them. Look at what they do to immigrants and our own citizens. They intentionally target children.
But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.
Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.
Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.
But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.
Blame the jews, says the expert "furry writer".
The House of Saud put out an interesting think piece suggesting the whole war might be a result of AI psychosis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540422
The submission here is flagged dead though.
Not sure how you could live with yourself if you were building software that was used to kill children. I know tools can be used in ways you can't anticipate but if you're actively supporting the military in their use of it which in my eyes makes you responsible.
You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened. Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press.
IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.
Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.
Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.
EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is:
- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.
- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.
- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.
- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.
Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.
And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.
As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
I agree with all of that. My worry is that the Guardian article is not doing any of it, and in fact is damaging the framework for even having such a conversation.. Instead they are repeating IRGC statements without attribution, and establishing them as background truth in the first paragraph. Then building an entire article on that flawed premise. Essentially, their article exists in the narrative universe create by the IRGC. I find that incredibly worrying.
My bar for present day journalists and the Guardian specifically is pretty low. The goal for the Guardian is apparently to get clicks and advance their agenda. Journalism and real news reporting is apparently dead. My commentary is more on the specifics of the incident.
Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.
Everyone acknowledges that the US killed a whole bunch of kids, including the US
I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.
This is incorrect. The US government (via Secretary Hegseth) has only confirmed that they are investigating the incident.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
Sources:
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421...
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...
> To this day we don't know what actually happened.
I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.
The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.
Have those investigations been launched?
I think it's likely that the explosion was caused by a US strike. But we don't actually know for sure that that's what happened - the US government has not confirmed it.
We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.
> Have those investigations been launched?
Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.
How long does it take to look at the coordinates programmed into the cruise missiles? Or to review existing satellite imagery for the location and other intelligence sources?
If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying.
I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already.
Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
>> the US government has not confirmed it
What have they done to deserve your trust? They started a war that they deny is a war. They told us a year ago they set Iran back a decade. Then they tell us 9 months later they're weeks from a nuclear bomb. I wouldn't trust the warmongers to admit they're child killers.
>> Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known
Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.
I think its fair to treat things that the Trump administration and the Iranian military agree on as facts. If they were distortions that favored one side, we would see pushback from the other. Maybe there are distortions that somehow benefit both of these parties, but it seems unlikely. At minimum, then, this was a school, the Americans bombed it, and children died as a result.
No. The only thing that the US government and IRGC agree on, at the moment, is that there was an explosion at the site of the school.
The US did NOT confirm that they are responsible for the bombing, or that children (or anyone) died as a result. This is a verifiable fact.
So, applying your own principle: the only thing you should treat as fact, is that there was an explosion at a school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...
> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
That article is based on anonymous sources ("according to [people] familiar with the preliminary findings").
It doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not an official confirmation by the US government, and it only speaks to the responsibility of the strike, not the various claims of "killed children".
Those sources don't say anything about casualties, or the presence of children. The NYT does its best to make it sound like they do ("responsible for a deadly strike"), but so far the only source for how deadly it is, remains the IRGC. And the NYT happily quotes their claim that the death toll was "at least 175 people".
For what it's worth, I personally believe the US is responsible for the strike. I also think the IRGC is lying about casualties, but there's no way to know for sure, and a US investigation probably won't tell us more on that point.
https://youtu.be/01-2pNCZiNk?si=b9GSPaNpnTGAI1wA
Isn't it a more reasonable explanation that the IDF deliberately had this school bombed because those schoolgirls were the children of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers?
The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
kakacik's razor - Never attribute to incompetence of IDF/Mosad that which is adequately explained by laser focus intent to murder and exterminate enemy at all costs, via all avenues, all is allowed.
You know how that was done with a Tomahawk
They've now burnt though almost ONE THOUSAND of those
They cost $4 million each, so that's another $4 BILLION that has to be replaced too
Imagine several more months of that or even through 2029
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has an updated tally on defensive and offensive munition expenditures. It's likely not 100% accurate due to the sensitive nature of those figures.
> 11,294 munitions in the first 16 days of the conflict, at a cost of approximately $26 billion.
Several detailed tables are in the link below.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
Incidentally, $26B is a sum in the same ballpark as the cost of eradicating homelessness in the US, ending large-scale hunger worldwide or making significant progress towards safe drinking water for all or the eradication of malaria.
But how would any of those activities increase the wealth of the decision makers (in the short term)?
It’s a tale as old as time: start a war to support the military industrial complex. Imagine a $4 billion investment into public transportation or parks. Every 10 years we can invest into a new city instead of bombing some kids overseas (whose siblings, fueled by hatred, then commit terror attacks on the west).
We'll run out long before 2029. The 850 fired so far is about a quarter of the entire supply.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-uses-h...
So far, they are not funded to do this for that long. They have floated a $200B bill to congress, which made national news coverage. It would start a huge, prolonged fight over the war and actually force them to ask permission from congress to fight it (barring totally disregarding the constitution which is still a possibility).
Unfortunately I can very well imagine several more months and years of this. We are still fighting a forever war that started in 2001. This is all a generation of Americans will know, and that is sad.
Don’t worry. The Saudis and UAE will happily pay all costs of the war.
I think more than one. One and then another 1 hour after
Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.
Google it. Iran has waged a war on the US for 50 years. On many occasions through state-sponsored proxies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela%E2%80%93Iran_ghost_f...
Unsanctioned flights between Iran and a third country is tantamount to waging a war on the US in your view?
Do you want me to sit here and summarize 50 years of conflict for you?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/03/the-iranian-regi...
Yes. They funded Hamas' invasion of Israel, a close ally of the US, which intentionally killed over 1000 civilians.
They have also repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons on Israel and were in the process of developing such weapons.
I've never seen anyone with negative karma on HN. Who decides who gets to have nukes? Why doesn't Israel lead by example?
>> has A attacked B?
> Yes, C attacked D
Something that a lot of tech people, especially in Silicon Valley, seem to want to forget, is that at every level you still have people making decisions. AI is suggesting but someone, somewhere, still has to make the decision to act on that suggestion.
It's still people doing people things.
The immediate concern isn't really fully autonomous systems, it's that the nature and design of recommender/suggestion systems prompt humans to sleepwalk through their responsibilities.
Which is already happening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
Are Americans not even aware of their own history? The US carpet bombed the SHIT out of Korea and Vietnam. All it did was convince their enemies to fight.
And then in Afghanistan and Iraq the US terrified of every shadow blew up anything that looked suspicious- again only serving their enemies.
It is all just so damn tiresome and America never learns because it literally cannot go 5 years without starting some unnecessary and ultimately futile conflict.
Imagine how much money China is saving.
The school was located adjacent to (or on the border of) an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval compound/base. Evidence (satellite imagery, verified videos, missile fragments consistent with a US Tomahawk cruise missile, and geolocation) shows the area was targeted as part of strikes on that military site
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
Really? Everyone thought the US had *missed*.
AI isn't an excuse for war crimes. Remember this at, and after, election time.
Israel and the US are bombing lots of schools and hospitals and civilian infrastructure, this is not the only case. This is intentional genocide, not a software/organizational/human error.
Check out this example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4egp7lwno
"As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA".
It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"."
This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad.
It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".
I think nobody with a couple of neurons still buys the "every school and hospital in Gaza were Hamas, so we bombed them" nazi-zionist rhetoric.
Ask the people of Gaza themselves, what they think of Hamas.
But they didn't bomb every school in Gaza. You made that up. One school was even 'bombed' when a PIJ missile landed in its carpark but you made up the IDF doing that, which made you look silly when the hospital was still there in the morning. And MSF openly admit that Hamas was operating out of their hospitals.
> nazi-zionist rhetoric.
Holocaust invertion is when someone equates the idea that Jews should be able to live in their own homeland safely with nazism.
The Israeli state leaders is proudly declaring superiority of their people, the need for vital space (Lebensraum, the great Israel), segregating their own citizens, conducting pogroms, you have all the doctrine there. Go find out where this book played before and how it all ended up.
Help me understand how this justifies the collateral damage.
I am countering the parent's statement that seems to indicate the US and Israel are intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure systematically for no reason. A lot of this infrastructure is targeted for good reason because it is used for military purposes.
This is totally unrelated to the topic where it seems the one school in question was incorrectly targeted based on what we know today (though not intentionally).
The general framework for justifying collateral damage is that enough care has to be taken to minimize it vs. the value of the military objective being achieved. Attacking an IRGC headquarters intentionally based in a school (e.g. if the example in Syria was to be attacked by Israel for example) still needs to pass this test. I.e. Israel would have to take measures to minimize collateral damage which would be proportional to the military value it gains by hitting the IRGC. But the (Syrian) school would have been considered a legitimate military target and the outrage should be towards the IRGC setting up camp there.
To anyone responding to this be aware that this is one of the worst zionists we have on this website.
You threaten other countries with a nuclear holocaust and refuse to back down after 50 years of diplomacy - you get KO'd.
> This is intentional genocide
Do you think it's genocide when the IRGC kill 30-40K Persian civilians? Or only when Americans missiles aimed at a military base miss their target?
Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.
This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.
Ai makes mistakes, we all know that.
Yeah no big deal right?
That is not what this article is about at all.
>The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.
Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...
Replacing one java tool with another doesn't solve anyone's problems. If they'd only used Rust then lives would have been saved.
Meh, that sounds like a cargo-cult to me ;)
Don't go there.
Telling my children that "cargo cults" happened because of Rust :)
Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?
Yes, the US has 160 schools on military bases:
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...
Yeah man. Who's ever heard of a military base with a school on, or near it besides every military officer with a family ever?
The Guardian carrying water for the AI industry. The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile. We get that Maven is Palantir, but it integrates Claude:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.
I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.
I assume you actually read the article and didn't just post this after a quick skim, yes? Because saying this:
> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile
Doesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.
The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.
The article you're responding to is making specific operational claims about Claude's (basically non-) relevance. I'd be interested to hear if you're directionally correct, but forgive me if I need more details than "but it integrates Claude".
This is not a correct take at all given the contents of the article.
Better than carrying water for people who blame inanimate tools for their own personal and professional failures.
WaPO writes that Claude selected targets:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.
Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."
We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.
Both the Washington Post and the Guardian articles agree that the system used here was Maven.
The key sentence in that Washington Post article appears to be:
> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements.
As far as I can tell this is the public announcement - a press release from November 2024: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241107699415/en/Ant...
> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.
We know that Palantir used AI for target selection in Gaza:
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.
You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.
That article you are quoting there is from April 2024. The Claude + Palantir deal was announced in November 2024.
The "supply chain risk" claims came from a deeply non-serious executive team who don't like "woke AI". They're not credible.