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Chapter 1: What was the initial incident that sparked the discussion about AI in warfare?
One of the earliest headlines in the U.S.-led war in Iran involved the bombing of a girls' primary school in Minab. Between 175 and 180 people were killed in the attack, most of them young girls. Meanwhile, adjacent to the school was a military compound of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Was AI to blame? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor.
Today is Monday, March 30th, 2026.
Chapter 2: How is AI being deployed in the US-led war in Iran?
The U.S.-led war in Iran is the first global conflict where AI is playing a major role both on the literal battlefield and on social media where the battle for hearts and minds is playing out. Are we entering a dangerous new evolution of warfare with AI? We're going to dig into all of it with two experts today.
Joining me to discuss the nascent use of AI on the battlefields of Operation Epic Fury is Alok Mehta, Director of the Wadwani AI Center for CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks so much for joining me on the excerpt, Alok.
Chapter 3: What distinguishes the use of AI in the Iran conflict from previous wars?
Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Chapter 4: At what point in the military kill chain is AI being utilized?
Start us out, if you would, with a 30,000-foot view of how AI is being deployed in the US-led war in Iran. What makes this conflict so different with regards to AI?
I think over time, we've seen an evolution in the use of AI on autonomy in the battlefield. So if you look at what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, we've seen lots of pioneering uses of AI in that war. And now in Iran, we're seeing more of an evolution
You think about it in terms of what the US is capable of, the best examples we have, we've seen some previews from Palantir of how the Maven smart system might work. And so we're seeing that they've incorporated new generative AI technology into that system.
Chapter 5: What ethical considerations arise from using AI in military operations?
And so the operations we're seeing in Iran by the US military are incorporating new generative AI tools, I think, in the first instance where that's happening for the U.S. military and sort of an actual hot battlefield situation.
There's an old terminology that I want to bring in here, and that's the kill chain, a chain of events that starts with identifying a target and ends with an attack. At what strategic point in the kill chain is AI being used?
AI is primarily being used to the best of our understanding as sort of a tool that helps with integration of various types of information streams.
So you can think of AI tools as helping to bring together and synthesize lots of data from things like satellite imagery, troop telemetry, bring it together into an interface where then operators are able to sort of query the system and help with things like
conducting intelligence operations, finding gaps in intelligence, and finding various operational strategies to remedy intelligence gaps, brainstorming operational plans, and then sort of coming up with strategic options for dealing with various battlefield situations.
then you are able to use AI to sort of task drones with humans sort of involved in making decisions about where those attacks will happen, what kinds of targets are being struck.
But right now, most of the use of AI is really in helping people in the military manage the enormous amount of information that's coming across their desks and be able to interface with that information using a more naturalistic type of way of interacting with it.
Look, what guardrails are there for ensuring that a target is a legitimate military one and not, say, a girls' school, as happened on day one of the conflict?
So the U.S. military has a directive that oversees or provides guidance on how it's able to use autonomy in military systems. And this directive, DOD Directive 3000.09, lays out some of the ways that is appropriate and not appropriate for the military to use autonomous systems essentially.
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Chapter 6: How is generative AI impacting the narrative of the war on social media?
And the key text here is that it requires an appropriate level of human judgment in decisions, especially decisions that have high consequences like use of lethal force on the battlefield. And so what is happening is that the military almost certainly has human oversight over selection and actual execution of military strikes on targets.
To the best of our understanding, this particular situation with the school was an issue not with the particular use of AI in this instance, but issues with the underlying data. Essentially, I think the latest intelligence we have is that there were errors in the database that this site had previously been sort of a military installation. Its use had been transformed.
It had been turned into a school. And our systems, our various data feeds, had not fully incorporated that. And so that sort of persistent error in the data continue to make its way through the system.
Chapter 7: What are the dangers of AI-generated content in shaping public perception?
And it ultimately led to the circumstance in which the school was targeted.
And developers of AI technology, including Claude and Maven, two of the most widely used AI tools, have voiced their concerns about the use of AI in warfare, specifically with regards to autonomous weapons systems versus decision support systems. Can you talk me through that distinction and how that plays out on the battlefield?
Yeah, so the distinction here would be the difference between telling, so sort of incorporating a bunch of information, selecting a target, and then telling a drone to attack that target. And that would involve low levels of autonomy on the drone. So you can tell it, I want you to go here. I want you to drop your munitions in this location.
And then the drone will use various low levels of autonomy to make sure that as it's flying, it's able to navigate
Chapter 8: How does misinformation from AI-generated imagery affect trust in media?
to the location, sort of navigate around obstacles, make sort of low-level decisions to be able to continue on its flight path. That is a big difference between the type of autonomy in which you sort of provide a much more
high level or general guidance to a drone of say, I want you to attack a strategic target, say attack enemy troop formations, and then the drone sort of flies away, has its own sort of sensors, looks at the battlefield, makes decisions about what it thinks is an enemy formation, and then engages without further human intervention and attack on that formation.
So now you have a lot more things that you want the drone to do. The requirements are much more precise. It has to make decisions that are a lot harder. And so this is the kind of distinction that the companies that you're talking about are worried about, which is as you give higher and higher level of abstraction in terms of the orders to drones. It's required to make more decisions.
And our current AI tools, while very good, are not reliable in making those kinds of decisions in high stakes battlefields at the level of reliability that we really want when you're engaging in military operations.
Is there an ethical line when it comes to using AI in warfare?
I think there are almost certainly going to be developments in how we think about the appropriate use of AI in warfare. Some of that will develop as we figure out what these AI tools are capable of. Not only that, but as we figure out various issues around implementation of AI in actual systems. So it's one thing to think about AI in the abstract.
It turns out that when you put AI in physical systems, there are all sorts of issues that you don't anticipate as you try to integrate AI with various physical components. And I think we're going to be engaging in a learning process in which we understand more about the capabilities of AI systems. We learn more about the capabilities of computers.
those systems when they're integrated into a bigger module, like an actual drone, and we get some experience about how they work in the real world, then I do hope we have discussions within our government, between government and lawmakers about what is the appropriate end of use of military technology or AI and military technology and where we might want to put some guardrails to make sure that we're
protecting our troops, protecting our reputation as a country, ensuring that people trust AI technology as a whole.
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