Faulty intelligence, outdated satellite imagery, staffing cuts and heavy reliance on artificial intelligence contributed to a US strike that killed around 120 children at a school in the Iranian city of Minab.
More than 1,000 targets were struck during the first 24 hours of the operation, following an order for an extensive air assault in late February, according to the officials.
Officials familiar with the Pentagon’s internal review characterised the incident as the result of a series of preventable lapses rather than one decisive error, according to a Bloomberg report. The officials, who spoke anonymously, said several smaller mistakes and missed opportunities combined to allow the strike to take place. But officials said there was clear evidence that its function had changed, Bloomberg report citing internal Pentagon probe officials.
The Minab site had been identified as a military compound years earlier.
On May 19, CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said preliminary Pentagon findings had ‘correlated’ the strike with US forces. They expected the system to identify outdated or inconsistent intelligence, Bloomberg reported, according to officials involved in the investigation. Palantir said it ‘is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies’ and that there was no evidence its software was at fault, Bloomberg further reported.
Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into minutes with the help of Maven, according to people familiar with the Pentagon’s review. Following the Minab strike, Palantir added new capabilities to Maven that can ‘re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed’, according to a person familiar with the matter, the report added. In June, US President Donald Trump said that ‘nobody’ had deliberately targeted the school.
Althiught, the United States has not disputed responsibility for the Minab strike since evidence of the Tomahawk missile emerged.
