NEWCASTLE, England: The US-Israel war on Iran has been described as “the first AI war”. But recent deployments of artificial intelligence are, in fact, the latest in a long history of technological developments that prize a need for speed in the military “kill chain”.
“Sixty seconds – that’s all it took,” claimed a former Israeli Mossad agent of the strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Feb 28, the first day of the US-Israel war on Iran.
The speed and scale of war have been significantly enhanced by use of AI systems. But this need for speed brings serious risks for civilians and military combatants alike.
Modern military operations produce and rely on an enormous amount of intelligence. This includes intercepted phone calls and text messages, the mass surveillance of the internet (known as “signals intelligence”), as well as satellite imagery and video feeds from loitering drones. We can think of all this intelligence as data – and the problem is, there’s too much of it.
As early as 2010, the US Air Force was concerned about “swimming in sensors and drowning in data”. Too many hours of footage, and too many analysts manually reviewing this intelligence.
AI systems can dramatically speed up the analysis of military intelligence. Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, recently confirmed the use of AI tools in the war against Iran, saying:
These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds, so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react … Advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.
In 2024, an investigation by Georgetown University found that the US Army’s 18th Airborne Corps had employed AI to assist with intelligence processing – reducing a team of 2,000 to just 20.