Pentagon Rewires Palantir Maven After Iran School Strike

Two Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28. More than 150 people were killed, at least 123 of them children. Seven months later, US Central Command has changed the way it picks what to hit.

According to Bloomberg, the fix has three parts: a revised workflow for refreshing and vetting planned targets, new open-source data feeds to better track civilian movement, and dozens of upgrades to Palantir's Maven Smart System. Palantir has added capabilities intended to have Maven 're-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed.'

The school was on the target list because outdated intelligence had it cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility. Maven pulled it out of a batch of candidates and returned it as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign.

The other half of the failure was staffing. Defense Secretary Hegseth had cut headcount across the Pentagon's civilian-harm mitigation teams by roughly 90%, to fewer than 20 staff members. CENTCOM's team was reduced from 10 to 1. No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, officials involved in the internal investigation said. That was a consequence of the cuts, and also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations.

The revised Maven, in short, is being asked to catch what the humans it replaced would have caught. Our earlier alert covered the underlying investigation.