By Justin James McShane
On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel opened Operation Epic Fury with a volume of strikes that would have been organizationally impossible a decade earlier. In the first twenty-four hours U.S. forces struck more than 1,000 targets. Officials later credited Palantir’s Maven Smart System, the operational descendant of the 2017 Project Maven initiative, with compressing the find-fix-track-target-engage-assess cycle from hours or days into minutes and, in some workflows, seconds. Six months later the war continues in cycles of escalation and pause around the Strait of Hormuz. The same software stack that accelerated the opening barrage now sits inside every major U.S. combatant command and a growing NATO footprint. What follows is a technical account of how that stack works, what it has done in this conflict, and where the public record remains incomplete.
TL;DR
Project Maven began in April 2017 as a computer-vision program to label objects in drone full-motion video. It is now the Maven Smart System, a Palantir-built data-fusion and targeting platform ingesting well over 150 sensor and intelligence feeds.
Computer-vision models first raised reported daily target throughput from under 100 to roughly 1,000. Large language models layered on top of that stack have been credited with a further jump toward several thousand nominations per day.
CENTCOM and Pentagon officials have confirmed AI tools, including Maven Smart System, supported Operation Epic Fury. Peak classified usage reached approximately 20 billion tokens per day. A sworn declaration by the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer states that the Grok Gov model inside MSS helped enable more than 2,000 munitions against 2,000 distinct targets in 96 hours.
Humans retain the final engagement decision. Officials have repeatedly stated that Maven recommends, ranks, and packages; it does not autonomously fire.
A Tomahawk strike on the first day hit an IRGC naval compound in Minab adjacent to a functioning girls’ elementary school, killing more than 150 civilians, most of them children. Public reporting indicates the building remained coded as military in outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data. An investigation has not publicly assigned specific fault to any algorithm.
Oversight of MSS is moving to the Chief Digital and AI Office. The program is becoming a formal program of record. NATO has fielded its own MSS instance.
