> American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. [...] Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.
> [...] In 2019, the scholar Morgan Ames published The Charisma Machine, a study of how certain technologies draw attention, resources and attribution toward themselves and away from everything else. [...] A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organises iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history.
> [...] 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. What mattered was what Maven did to the targeting process: it consolidated the systems, compressed the time and reduced the people.
> [...] Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is. This “staying” is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it.
Very insightful article about the targeting of air power.
