A.I. Accelerates Targeting and Planning for the U.S. and Israel in Iran

What Happened?

The U.S. and Israel have been using A.I. programs to accelerate targeting and planning for their air, drone, and missile strikes against Iran.

According to the Guardian, Anthropic’s A.I. model, Claude, has been used by the U.S. military to plan airstrikes because the program ‘shortens the kill chain,’ by speeding up the process from target identification and selection to the launch of new attacks. 

American and Israeli forces launched over one thousand strikes in the first twenty-four hours of combat alone using a combination of drones, cruise missiles, and conventional aircraft. 

Why it Matters

The use of A.I. programs in military operations is a relatively new phenomenon, though Israel used A.I. extensively during the Gaza War from 2023 through 2025. A.I. programs like Claude work by combining the search capabilities of Google with a new, automatically generated response capability that can answer specific questions from users.

If applied to military operations, the program could generate target lists instantly instead of the days or weeks of human-led intelligence work that was used in previous conflicts.

Targeting refers to a process where information is gathered, evaluated, and distilled into actionable information for military assets capable of carrying out armed attacks. Information about the location of potential targets can be obtained from electronic intercepts, satellite imagery, or human sources on the ground.

Targets include enemy combatants, installations, infrastructure, and equipment. Sifting through large amounts of information, then distilling the results into target lists, can take teams of human analysts days or weeks to complete.

A.I. can complete the entire targeting process in seconds, generating instant target lists for operators. Those lists can then be shared with ships, planes, and missile batteries so weapons can be selected for use on each target.

The advantage of using A.I. is speed, especially for high-value targets like Iran’s former Supreme Leader Khamenei. Because leaders tend to stay on the move, they can often elude attacks that take days or weeks to plan. But A.I. can ascertain their whereabouts after each movement, giving military units the ability to track them in nearly real time.

The drawback of using A.I. is the potential for the program to make mistakes, and for those mistakes to get passed on to military units who may then attack the wrong locations or buildings. The question is how much military organizations rely on A.I. to pick targets, and are those target selections all evaluated by human operators before strikes are launched?

Currently, answers to those questions are not known publicly. 

How it Affects You

Since the number of strikes launched by Israel and the United States on the first day of war against Iran far exceeds the number of conventional aircraft in their combined inventories, then the remainder must have been carried out by cruise missiles and drones.

The U.S. military has acknowledged using attack drones against Iran, and the combination of rapid A.I. targeting, along with huge numbers of drones, probably provides a glimpse at a new way of war in the twenty-first century.