Under the Barack Obama presidency, US militarism undertook a new shape. Inheriting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan from the previous administration, and a population struggling under the pressures of the recession and war-weariness, Obama’s administration sought to placate antiwar opposition in the United States, while expanding and maintaining global hegemony. While reports of the slow withdrawal of troops from Iraq provided a public face of deescalation, the US continued to wage what has come to be known as a series of “secret wars”, utilizing predator drones, special operations units, political assassinations, and a close working relationship with Blackwater. This shift in how war was conducted meant the US did not have to maintain heavy troop deployment to maintain an iron grip on the nations it sought to dominate. Perhaps more important, it increased the speed at which the military could kill, while at the same time reducing the vast majority of victims to targets on the screen of a drone operator. Distant, impersonal, inhuman to the observer. The effectiveness of this method of war can be seen today in the fact that drone strikes have become a nearly-universal aspect of not just modern conflict, but surveillance as well.
We mention this not to bring the crimes of the Obama administration under any further scrutiny, but because the tactics developed under this administration had consequences that we now live through, and can observe. We mention this because we are seeing the beginnings of a similar “advancement” in military technology unfold today, with a similar end-goal of making the war macine faster and deadlier, while distorting its victims into data on a screen. While initially used by the Trump administration in short-term terror operations such as the illegal capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, it is in the ongoing US war with Iran and its inauguration via the Minab school bombing, that we see how the Pentagon and Palantir’s Project Maven may define the future of US Imperialism.
From Walkouts to War Rooms
Imagine Google Earth for war, a map of war with white dots, infused with information like elevation, coordinate, what is precisely there, whether it’s friendly or foe.
Katrina Manson, author of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare
The US Department of Defense’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team, known by the project name Maven, began not with Palantir, but with Google. In 2017, the company was contracted by the Pentagon for the project, with the stated aim of using the growing industry of machine learning software to process aerial images and videos for the purposes of surveillance and “target identification.” From the beginning, Maven was a controversial project, with Google choosing to end their involvement in 2018 after a series of walkouts staged by employees over it. That same year, the contract was taken over by Palantir, with additional contributions from Amazon, Booze Allen Hamilton, L3Harris, Microsoft, ECS, and over a dozen other companies since.
Under Palantir, the project shifted from primarily feeding information for active combat forces or drone operators, to becoming one of the most critical pieces of technology in the United States’ attacks across the globe. With the rise of LLMs beginning in the early 2020s, Maven shifted from a project centered primarily on data to one of decision-making, with Palantir integrating Anthropic’s Claude AI model into the project in 2024. Anthropic would later exit the project in early March of 2026 due to a rift between the company and the Pentagon, wherein Anthropic was unwilling to remove guardrails on their AI model that prevented its use in directing autonomous weapons or the surveillance of US citizens. Anthropic would later be labeled as a “supply chain risk” as retaliation, while other companies such as Google clamored to step in and secure a contract for their models.
Given that disagreement over autonomous weapons safeguards was one of the chief reasons for the split between Anthropic and the US government, the implications of the integration of LLMs into Maven is not to be understated. Even so, these “guardrails” as they currently stand serve as little more than symbolic posturing. From their inception AI models were marketed as a tool for automation, sold on promises of increasing production speed in any of economic sectors where they were adopted. The cost of this speed, however, has become increasingly apparent as well, with generated code, art, and writing often containing various errors. In the case of coding, this has led to serious security problems in AI code. Despite this, the adoption of the tool continues across the the industry, the reason being that its fast, cheap, and is able to automate away the jobs of developers.
In Maven, we see this same principle hold, with the primary goal of the project being the increase of strike speed and automation of the “kill chain” used by the Pentagon to determine strike targets. We also see the same costs hold.
Funeral of the children of Minab Primary School for Girls, by Tasnim News Agency.
Maven in Iran
The Radda airstrike in 2013, wherein the US military used drones to bomb a Yemeni wedding procession, became one of the key events bringing the threat of drone warfare to public attention across the US, as well as a rebuttal to the claim that drones were a means to prevent civilian deaths during military operations. Despite outcry from both Yemeni officials and activists in the US, the official response by the US amounted to little more than minor compensation to the families of the victims, and suspension on the use of drones in Yemen which lasted only a single year.
The first day of the Trump administration’s “Operation Epic Fury” saw the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, resulting in the death of over 170 people, many of whom were children. This attack was carried out using a Tomahawk missile, with the target being selected using Maven. The platform had suggested the school as a valid target due to outdated satellite imagery indicating the building as an IRGC compound, and the Pentagon quickly approved it without further investigation into the accuracy of the database they were working with. In the first day of the US attacks on Iran, Maven was used to carry out over 1,000 strikes. From the first day of the conflict up until the ceasefire, at least 1,701 civilians were killed in Iran alone. Despite the high number of civilian deaths, Palantir was praised by Trump after its extensive use by the Pentagon in their terror campaign against the people of Iran.
Despite the failure of the US to achieve its goals, the Iran War was an advancement for Palantir and its entrenchment into the Department of Defense. While Maven had seen use in various special operations prior, it was in Iran that it first became a system of full-scale warfare, automating away over half of the Pentagon’s “kill chain” used for determining targets, and increasing the number of targets chosen from less than 100 per day to nearly 5,000. Working closely with defense contractors and AI companies alike, the Pentagon seeks to deepen its reliance on the project, with plans to use information that is entirely AI-generated by June of this year. This is an obvious boon for the private companies involved, who continue to tout the project allows for quick and accurate strikes despite research showing that Maven‘s target identification accuracy is actually lower than that of a human analyst.
Laid bare, the trouble of Maven is like that of AI-centric automation in other industries: it promises speed and accuracy, but only delivers on speed. It makes mistakes, and these mistakes go uncorrected due to human bias to trust machine output. What makes Maven different, however, is that its errors cost thousands of lives, and that Palantir is the one piloting the project.
Fighting the New Face of War
Power does not rest in the hands of the corporate-government alliance of a declining empire, but in the hands of those who are unafraid to resist.Under the Trump administration, the United States has become increasingly violent in its imperialism, shifting from the covert form of warfare that had marked the prior two administrations as it openly violates international law and displays unbridled aggression toward any powers it sees as running counter to its aims of maintaining global hegemony. The actions and rhetoric of Trump and other administration officials echoes that of Palantir’s own Alex Karp in many ways, with both advocating for might-is-right politics under what Karp refers to as “hard power”.
The similarity of Palantir’s position to the US’s warmongering is no coincidence, but rather is indicative of a commingling of private corporations and the war machine – a corporatization of the military as the American imperialism fights against its own decline. It is in this environment that we begin to see the weapons that are to be used against this decline. Central is Maven, and its attempt to transform war into something that can be waged with minimal human intervention on the side of the US. It is a landscape of increasing surveillance and automated terror, with disregard for international law and loss of life.
In the wake of Project Maven‘s increasing pervasiveness in the Department of Defense, resistance against it becomes increasingly important. While the deepening collusion between private companies it and the military represents a great threat, it is also the source of its own weakness. Tech companies by and large tend toward what is profitable, and in the case of defense contracting their profit can only be maintained so long as the outcry against them remains minimal. As was mentioned earlier, Maven was initially headed by Google, and it was due to opposition and organizing by employees in the company itself that they were pressured into ending their involvement in 2017.
The victories against Palantir have already been monumental, and dissent within the company is becoming more prevalent. Every win is a win against Maven, and against the very war machine it is entangled with. By maintaining active, organized opposition against not just them, but all the tech companies seeking to become war profiteers, we make Maven as much of a liability as it is an opportunity. By fighting back, we show that power does not rest in the hands of the corporate-government alliance of a declining empire, but in the hands of those who are unafraid to resist.