The unprovoked war between the United States and Israel against Iran has entered its fourth week. The most tragic image associated with Operation Epic Fury is the “accidental” death of more than 175 Iranians, mostly schoolgirls, from a US missile attack in the early stages of this pre-emptive war, which began on February 28th.
Open source intelligence confirms that the weapon used was a Tomahawk ground-attack cruise missile fired from a US Navy platform that attacked an elementary school for girls in Minab, southern Iran.
Why was an elementary school attacked in the first phase of the war? Especially when Israel demonstrated its ability to eliminate specific individuals and select high-value targets, paying considerable attention to the military relevance of the initial attacks. Was AI (artificial intelligence) the factor behind this unforgivable massacre?
A preliminary investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense suggests that the attack was a “targeting error” due to outdated intelligence indicating the site was an important military facility incorporated into the operational plan. The school was previously part of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) complex, but had been functioning as a civilian facility for nearly a decade. Apparently, the school was mistakenly identified as a military facility and left on the US target list. This is incompetent intelligence gathering and reinforces the image that the US military is trigger-happy when it comes to “accidentally” killing civilians, as was the case in Afghanistan.
The Department of Defense has launched a high-level investigation, and preliminary assessments indicate that while AI was not directly involved in the deaths of school children, its use in the target selection process was a contributing factor.
AI has been used extensively in current wars, contributing both to the narratives constructed by either side of the rivalry and to actual military operations.
The narrative portion includes industrial-scale disinformation and fake images consisting of AI-generated images, videos, and fabricated satellite images. This content floods social media platforms, making it difficult to distinguish between real and manufactured content.
Additionally, AI is being used to create deepfakes of war destruction by producing videos of explosive-like missile attacks. The “nasty tactics” in which fabricated satellite imagery and fake AI-powered technical-looking analyzes were disseminated to falsely discredit genuine, real-world war evidence were part of a flood of fake news that increased the fog of war, often leaving the real facts obscured.
The AI-generated propaganda was often malicious and malicious, and was produced in sufficient quantities that it included both anti-American and anti-Semitic posts, as well as the demonization of Iran and “crazy mullahs.” AI chatbots have been exploited innovatively, often identifying AI-generated fakes as real news.
This proliferation of fake or embroidered AI content has resulted in “information pollution,” making it difficult to distinguish between the facts related to the actual war against Iran and the fiction embedded in the “war over reality.”
Concerns about military misuse of AI stem from its perceived “rubber stamp” of targets. The idea is that the US and Israel, which have proven field capabilities in this niche, are leveraging AI to identify, prioritize, and target specific assets/positions, thereby leading to a dangerous reduction in human surveillance. This is called automatic recommendation rubber stamping.
Rushing the use of AI to narrow targets and favor speed over deliberation can result in large numbers of civilian casualties, as the tomahawk attack on Minab School is an example of.
According to reports from Washington, the US used Anthropic’s AI tool Claude to identify and attack approximately 900+ targets in the first 24 hours of Epic Fury. Apparently, Minab School was one of the unlucky places on the AI-generated list.
At what stage was there human intervention before the order to “kill”/attack was given? This is crucial in assigning human responsibility for authorizing the killing of an enemy with the help of AI, and many legal and ethical questions loom large.
A key concern regarding AI in warfare is the potential lack of human oversight in life-or-death decisions, which is complicated by three key conceptual challenges:
a) Autonomy and Accountability: As AI systems gain decision-making power, it becomes difficult to hold those higher up the human ladder accountable for mistakes or unethical behavior.
b) Lack of human judgment: AI cannot fully grasp complex situations, which can lead to unintended consequences and disproportionate reactions.
c) Escalation risk: Autonomous systems can outpace human intervention and accelerate conflict escalation.
In summary, by integrating AI directly into the targeting process, the time element of the “kill chain” has been significantly shortened. Notably, AI was used in a rudimentary manner by the United States in the Kuwait War in 1991, and that was rather for logistics. In the decades since, advances in technology have made AI far more capable and potentially deadly on the battlefield.
Currently, there are no specific international treaties or binding laws that prohibit or comprehensively regulate Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), often referred to as “killer robots,” or weapons that select and engage targets without meaningful human control. It’s like a video game, and the biggest danger is that the actual killing becomes remote, contactless “fun” — a repurposing of a phrase used by President Donald Trump in connection with the sinking of the Iranian warship Iris Dena.
The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) aims to limit the use of weapons that cause unnecessary suffering or indiscriminate effects, and the Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS (GGE) meets regularly to address challenges.
The CCW’s seventh review conference, scheduled to be held in November, will decide on next steps and could begin formal negotiations towards an international protocol or treaty regulating the use of AI in warfare.
But it would be monumentally foolish to expect ethics and humanism to temper the emergence of AI when the world’s most powerful nation declares itself unbound by any law, ignores customary “rules of engagement,” and recklessly embarks on Epic Fury.
