28, in Minab A volunteer searches through the rubble of Shajareh Tayyebeh school, shattered by a U.S. airstrike on Feb.
The investigation also found that the US military was working under intense time pressure before the February 28 assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were struck during the first 24 hours, and work that would normally take much longer to assess and approve potential targets was compressed into days or even minutes, according to officials familiar with the probe. Officials said staffing across those units had been cut sharply, with the Central Command team reduced from 10 members to one.
Instead, investigators have identified a series of failures across the US military’s targeting process, including outdated satellite imagery, intelligence that was not properly updated, reduced civilian-harm checks and reliance on the AI-enabled Maven Smart System to help process information and prioritise targets, according to a Bloomberg report. The full findings of the probe, which began in March, have not been released.
The Pentagon has not publicly accepted responsibility for the strike and has said the incident remains under investigation. Officials involved in the investigation said some personnel appeared to expect the system to identify inconsistencies or stale information in the intelligence supplied to it. Officials involved in the investigation said the Minab site passed through the various stages with high confidence that it was an IRGC facility. “Minab proved you should never be too confident,” one Pentagon official involved in the probe said, as quoted by Bloomberg. No member of the team reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials familiar with the investigation. A UN fact-finding mission said this week that there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the Minab attack and another US strike amounted to war crimes; a finding US has declined to acknowledge.
The findings do not establish that artificial intelligence independently selected the school as a target. Investigators have also examined the reduction in Pentagon teams responsible for assessing civilian harm. The investigation comes as the United Nations has separately raised concerns about the strike.
Such reviews had previously been used to assess civilian activity around potential targets and identify ways to reduce the risk to noncombatants.