Katrina Manson

bloomberg.comUS Military Modifies AI and Lethal Targeting Process After Iran School StrikeThe changes include refining processes for vetting targets and adding open-source data feeds to better track civilian movement.

NEW: US Central Command has made multiple changes to its lethal targeting process and boosted how it uses AI to help vet intelligence following a deadly strike against a school in Minab, Iran, according to US officials and people familiar with the matter. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

ft.comFT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026 — the shortlistContenders include titles on weight-loss drugs, AI weaponry and forecasting

Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare is shortlisted for the FT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026. www.ft.com/content/d0b2...

Stanley is among those who worry that delivery of intelligence may not be able to keep up with the speed of Maven, despite what he and other supporters say is the system’s promise to help make better decisions faster. The department is aggressively seeking to solve those gaps, he said.

Full story at this gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Pentagon has leaned into AI-enabled processes aimed at speeding up the so-called kill chain at a time of rising debate over the use and reliability of AI at war.

“It would have been a struggle” for the US to conduct so many strikes so quickly without Maven, said Cameron Stanley, head of the Pentagon’s digital and AI office, describing more than 13,000 targets hit within 38 days of Operation Epic Fury as “really a revolutionary number.”

The raft of changes at Centcom highlights the need to reduce the risks of errors in large-scale, high-speed combat operations. Some defense officials and experts have warned privately that the chances of another Minab are still too high.

The changes at Centcom, which haven’t been previously reported, focus on three key areas: refining processes and workflows for refreshing and vetting planned targets, adding new open-source data feeds to better track civilian movement, and making dozens of upgrades to Maven Smart System.

theguardian.comFeeling overwhelmed by the AI doom loop? Here’s the essential reading list to make sense of it allIt’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re headed

21 Sept

The Guardian recommends reading Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare “to make sense of it all”

The Guardian@theguardian.com

Feeling overwhelmed by the AI doom loop? Here’s the essential reading list to make sense of it all

Katrina Manson reposted

Frank Bajak

@fbajak.bsky.social

19 Sept

Replying to @fbajak.bsky.social

“Project Maven” the book also dispenses quickly with any notion that the enterprise was not, from its inception, about shortening with computer vision and AI the so-called “kill chain,” namely the time it takes to identify a military threat, determine it is legitimately hostile and then kill it.

Katrina Manson reposted

Frank Bajak

@fbajak.bsky.social

19 Sept

Replying to @fbajak.bsky.social

If you care about AI in war (it seems to have arrived quite fast and haphazardly) “Project Maven” is a must-read. Manson’s profiles of hard-charging “algorithmic warfare” pioneers benefit from her keen reporter’s eye and she never shrinks from the hardest questions. bsky.app/profile/katr...

Katrina Manson@katrinamanson.bsky.social

The Economist review of my book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare calls it “one of the most important books on war and technology in many years” and describes it as “a scintillating account.” www.economist.com/culture/2026...

economist.comThe AI that transformed American warfareMaven not only identifies targets—it tells commanders how to attack them, too

ft.comFT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026 — the longlistContenders include three former winners and titles on power, innovation and society

17 Aug

My book “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare” is long-listed for the Financial Times and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026 www.ft.com/content/d8f7...

bloomberg.comWhat a Killer Drone Swarm Looks Like Up CloseOn a quiet Maryland farm, a startup displays one possible future of warfare. The Pentagon is racing to determine how autonomous it can become.

14 Aug

NEW ON BLOOMBERG -- At a Maryland farm proud to say it sells “humanely raised” meat, a small team is cultivating one of the potentially more inhumane products of the artificial intelligence age: autonomous drone swarms. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

NEW FROM BLOOMBERG: The Defense Intelligence Agency has withdrawn a bid to improve a military intelligence system at the heart of lethal targeting following a protest from Palantir. Gift link at end.

Bloomberg couldn’t corroborate Gallagher’s claims, a Palantir spox said the company wasn’t in a position to make an assessment about alternative scenarios because the Pentagon investigation was still ongoing, and a Pentagon spox said the incident remains under investigation.

bloomberg.comAfter Palantir Beef, US Withdraws Bid to Improve Military IntelA US government agency has withdrawn a bid to improve a military intelligence system that is at the heart of lethal targeting following a protest from Palantir Technologies Inc., according to people f...

Read the full story at this gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

NEW FROM BLOOMBERG: The Defense Intelligence Agency has withdrawn a bid to improve a military intelligence system at the heart of lethal targeting following a protest from Palantir. Gift link at end.

Mike Gallagher, head of Palantir’s defense division and a former US Republican representative, told Japanese public broadcaster NHK in June in response to questions about Minab that he understood the problem was with the underlying database.

“There’s no question in my mind that if Palantir had been in charge of the underlying data set, that we could have avoided that tragedy,” Mike Gallagher said in reference to the deadly strike against Minab, arguing the US needs to modernize all its systems.

NEW FROM BLOOMBERG: The Defense Intelligence Agency has withdrawn a bid to improve a military intelligence system at the heart of lethal targeting following a protest from Palantir. Gift link at end.

The bid had been to improve DIA’s military intelligence system known as MARS, which contains record that inform how military commanders develop targets. Palantir complained the government was “impermissibly seeking a developmental solution when a commercial solution is already available.”

DIA military intel systems have incurred criticism since MARS was launched in 2018 to replace the legacy MIDB system. Those systems underpinned some elements of target development in the run up to the strike on a school in Minab, Iran, which killed an estimated 120 children.

npr.orgHere are the nonfiction books NPR staffers have loved so far this yearA biography of Hannibal Lecter. A meditation on trees. A memoir by a child prodigy violinist. A treatise on the way we poop. These are just a few of the nonfiction books our NPR colleagues are enjoyin...

14 July

“A tour de force of reporting” Thank you @NPR for featuring my book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare in your “Books We Love” list of nonfiction favorites so far this year. www.npr.org/2026/06/23/n...

Joined Bloomberg This Weekend to discuss my reporting about the deadly strike against the elementary school at Minab, Iran, that killed an estimated 120 children, longstanding problems with deficient US intelligence targeting databases and the atrophy of targeting over 20 years.

Centcom vetted its targets in the lead up to the operations against Iran, according to a person familiar. It wasn’t clear what processes were involved.

bloomberg.comAn Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike ProbeAn intelligence analyst’s missed remarks are among the missteps surfaced in an investigation into a deadly strike against an elementary school in Iran.

Full story at gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... Thanks for having me @bloomberg.com

In some cases during the 2010s, targeting data for historically low-priority locations such as Syria were 10 or 20 years old. It took more than a year to get new, clear imagery of North Korea and update thousand of potential targets there starting in 2017.

It would be “unthinkable” for a commander not to initiate so-called optional targets vetting for attacks planned in the opening day of a new military campaign, according to a former senior intelligence official. This can involve rechecking underlying intel including imagery.

Jack Shanahan, former Pentagon director for defense intelligence, told me he struggled to recruit and fill targeting roles in 2017: “We knew there was a dangerous shortage in the number of trained and experienced targeting personnel and weapons effects experts.”

“We also knew this would become a major problem in future conventional operations,” Shanahan, a retired Air Force three-star general, told me. He described targeting as a “moribund career field.”

NEW: An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

SCOOP: Bloomberg reviewed the Pentagon’s latest April 2026 changes to its joint targeting doctrine, a non-public document, and it foresees AI, rather than humans in “current ‘human in the loop’ systems,” initiating targeting actions in future. Humans will monitor. Gift link below.

“The speed of future warfare, along with our adversaries’ own advances in AI, may require the joint force to adopt completely autonomous systems,” says the publication, which was approved without public disclosure in April.

economist.comThe best books of 2026 so farWhether you are tight on time or have loads of it, here are our ideas for summer reading

29 May

Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare is on The Economist’s list of “The best books of 2026 so far” www.economist.com/culture/2026...

Katrina Manson reposted

CSIS | Center for Strategic & International Studies

@csis.org

21 May

HAPPENING NOW: Bloomberg reporter @katrinamanson.bsky.social joins CSIS's Emily Harding to discuss her new book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare. Listen to the conversation on the U.S. military’s first major AI initiative: https://bit.ly/4up7KgU

economist.comThe AI that transformed American warfareMaven not only identifies targets—it tells commanders how to attack them, too

18 May

nytimes.com6 New Books We Love This Week

2 May

“Six New Books We Love This Week” Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare is on the NYT’s Editors’ Choice list. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/b...

bloomberg.comGoogle Drops Out of Pentagon Drone Swarm Contest After AdvancingGoogle abruptly dropped out of a $100 million Pentagon prize challenge to create technology for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms after it was among the successful submissions, according to pe...

28 Apr

SCOOP: Google abruptly dropped out of a $100 million Pentagon prize challenge to create technology for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms after it was among the successful submissions, according to people briefed on the matter. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Exclusive: More than 580 Google workers including hundreds of AI researchers urge CEO Sundar Pichai to refuse classified military AI work, after senior Pentagon official tells me he is already in talks with Google. Our story on Bloomberg now, from me and Julia Love

The Pentagon started using Google’s Gemini agents on unclassified networks last month and a senior Pentagon official told me they were in talks with Google to use their agents on classified cloud too.

assets.bwbx.ioassets.bwbx.io

This is the text of Monday’s letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai: assets.bwbx.io/documents/us...

“Maven is not over,” said one organizer of the new letter, referring to protests against the Pentagon’s 2018 AI initiative that prompted Google not to pursue the project, and whose story I tell in my new book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare.

“We are employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the U.S. Department of Defense,” reads Monday’s protest letter to Google’s CEO. “As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes.”

bloomberg.comGoogle Staff Urge Pichai to Refuse Classified Military AI WorkHundreds of AI researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google have signed onto a letter urging Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai to refuse to make the company’s artificial intelligence systems available fo...

Story link here: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

21 Apr

Will be talking about impact and implications of Project Maven when it comes to defense-tech tomorrow in New York, 6-8pm. RSVP via link for free ticket. www.def.org/event-detail...

18 Apr

Thank you @nitasha.bsky.social and @bestbookstore.bsky.social for hosting a discussion about my book on the dawn of AI warfare. And thank you San Francisco for the questions! More here: bestbookstore.com/item/GFQL6zL...

eventbrite.comPentagon AI Warfare: How We Got Here & What's Next w/Award-Winning ReporterBEHIND THE SCENES: The dramatic story of the secretive decade-long Pentagon campaign to deliver America into the age of AI warfare

17 Apr

Bookstore talk this evening in San Francisco. Looking forward to @nitasha.bsky.social’s questions about the Pentagon’s development of AI warfare and my book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare. Best Bookstore, Union Sq

Katrina Manson@katrinamanson.bsky.social

I will be talking about my book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare in conversation with @nitasha.bsky.social this Friday 6.30pm at Best Bookstore in Union Square, San Francisco. Looking forward. RSVP (free) here: www.eventbrite.com/e/pentagon-a...