New Delhi:
It was a human who pulled the final trigger during the bombing at the compound of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in the southern Iranian city of Minab that killed at least 156 people, according to David Petraeus, former director of the United States's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the retired military officer, the decision was made with the help of the artificial intelligence, but ultimately, a human was responsible for making the choice.
The statement tells a different story than an earlier report that said an AI 'kill chain' was behind US strikes in which at least 123 children were killed.
'Humans pulled the trigger, machine helped', the former CIA chief said while speaking at the NDTV World Summit.
The general was advocating for military missions carried out by highly precise artificial intelligence when he was asked about the bombing in Iran's Minab.
"Actually [that was] a human judgement. That was not the machine making the decision, I believe. It was a human that decided, and it was helped by AI with targeting. AI is used extensively," he said.
"There have been mistakes, and you've seen these in various settings in the Middle East as well as, I'm sure, in Ukraine as well. These still are humans making the final decision, in a sense, to pull the trigger or press the button," he added.
He went on to advocate for a machine that would make decisions based on "very, very specific criteria and direction programmed by a human."
"Humans in the position that are going to make fundamental decisions are going to need to benefit from the doubters and the critics, as much as they are from the true believers," he said.
What Earlier Report Said
Recently, a Bloomberg investigation found that before the war started in Iran, the military was tasked with identifying targets, attacking which could paralyse Iran's military before Tehran even had a chance to respond. High on their list were sites associated with the IRGC's naval division, which is tasked with defending and, at times, disrupting the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.
Officials told the publication that inside the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversaw the attack, some personnel relied too much on the AI embedded in the Maven Smart System to identify these targets and plan the initial attack. The process used by the US military to approve such targets is reportedly called a "kill chain."
Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School was built almost a decade ago on land previously occupied by an IRGC naval unit. With its uncorrected classification as an IRGC facility, the Minab school was fed into Maven along with other potential targets. It ultimately emerged as one of the recommended day-one targets, officials said.
Developed by Palantir Technologies, the AI-enabled system uses more than 150 different data inputs to create a coherent set of information to inform commanders' decisions on complex military operations -- from targeting to command and control.
Traditionally, this process included a long chain of people from intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, commanders, and weapons crews. But today, Maven dominates decision-making in these operations, from the initial intelligence inputs to later review stages. Officials said the AI tool helped reduce work that previously took hours to just minutes.