Pentagon AI chief praises Palantir tech for speeding battlefield strikes
Going from eight systems to one means fewer people make decisions to unleash Epic Fury
As the US continues its strikes on Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, speakers at Palantir's AIPCON event on Thursday said the company’s Maven Smart System product has shortened the time it takes the Department of Defense to select and hit targets on the battlefield during the conflict.
“So we’ve gone from identifying the target to now coming up with a course of action, to now actioning that target, all from one system. This is revolutionary,” said Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the DoD. “We were having this done in about eight or nine systems where humans were literally moving detections left and right in order to get to our desired end state, in this case closing a kill chain.”
Palantir’s chief commercial officer Ted Mabrey told the AIPCON audience that the analytics software company is supporting Operation Epic Fury.
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"Because of the pacing and the way in which it can operate, technology is in the fight for these customers. Whether that is literally in the fight supporting something like Epic Fury or as you heard from Admiral Okano, what it is accountable to in ShipOS is not some technical requirement. It’s to ships at sea and subs in the water," he said, referring to Vice Admiral Seiko Okano, who also spoke.
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Stanley's keynote was all about Maven's widespread deployment across the military. From 2021 to 2022, he was chief of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team, which was also known as Project Maven.
He said Maven began in 2016 when commanders were looking for what the military called “the third offset,” with “offset” meaning the area in which the US military had an overwhelming advantage against an adversary. The first offset is nuclear weapons, and the second is stealth and precision guided arms. The third is the speed and accuracy of the decisions made by commanders, and that’s where Maven came in.
Google was the original partner on the project but quit the work in 2018 due to employee protests.
It took seven years, but Maven Smart System, as Palantir calls it, has consolidated “eight or nine” systems for decision makers to look at into a “single visualization tool,” Stanley said. Maven allows operators to select data and move it into a workflow where commanders can determine how best “to prosecute” the target, he said.
Palantir architect Chad Wahlquist added that data, logic, and action are all orchestrated through Maven.
“I saw stats where normally we would have 2,000 intelligence officers, actually trying to do targeting and look at stuff. Now that’s 20 and they’re doing it in rapid succession as well,” Wahlquist said. “So, that, doing more with less, is really enabling the warfighter to really keep everyone safe and really go after the mission.”
During Thursday’s AIPCON sessions, Patrick Dods, a US Naval Academy graduate, former submariner, and now an engineer who works on Maven, said the project started by using computer vision models in support of intelligence analysts who needed to make sense of the battlefield more quickly, or “collapsing the kill chain.” Dods compared it to reducing the hay in a haystack when hunting the needle.
“This is enabling them to identify the points of interest of the objects of interest that they care about and rapidly build a plan of action, not only around tactical action, but around operational and theater level missions that they might need to execute,” he said.
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During the presentation, Stanley displayed a map of the middle east in Maven that showed dozens of cartographic icons in Iran marked in red, some designated “HQ.” One of the marks was positioned on an area of the map that corresponds to Minab, where a missle struck a girls' school near a military target, killing more than 160 people. There were also several apparent overlaps with an Iranian strike map the Department of War showed to reporters on Tuesday.
Maven’s capabilities keep US service members alive, he said.
“Palantir is very helpful in delivering this. Maven Smart System is an incredible system,” Stanley said. “No fair fights. If I can avoid it, let's not have fair fights. Our guys win and we come home.”
In his opening remarks at AIPCON, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the company’s goal is to bring US servicemen and servicewomen home alive. He did not mention the strikes in Iran or Operation Epic Fury.
“If you’re expecting us not to support warfighters once they're in battle you got the wrong company,” he said. “Once the war starts, we’re not interested in debating how we’re supporting them. We are very, very proud to have our role in making sure that American men and women come home safe and happy and proud of what they’re doing. And that sometimes means that people on the other side don’t go home. And we are very proud of that.” ®