Bloomberg: Inside the US ‘kill chain’ that destroyed an Iranian school

The destroyed Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school on March 21
Photo: Getty Images

Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab, Bloomberg reveals.

Within hours of a Feb. 28 missile attack that hit an Iranian school, some Pentagon personnel knew the US was responsible, according to officials involved in an internal investigation of the incident. That probe found what the officials now describe as a cascade of preventable failures.

Two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School building and its grounds that Saturday, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. The strikes devastated the two-story school, which was built on land that was part of a military compound in the southern Iranian town of Minab. In terms of child casualties, it’s the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century.

United Nations investigators said that there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the strike on Minab and another US attack that took place on the same day amounted to war crimes. The US has yet to publicly accept responsibility for the school strike, and President Donald Trump has previously suggested it was Tehran’s fault. As recently as July 14, he told Fox News, “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.”

But in interviews, officials with direct involvement in the Pentagon’s internal investigation have offered some of the first accounts of the probe. The strike didn’t result from a single catastrophic decision but an accumulation of smaller ones, they said, and their review has identified a series of missed opportunities to prevent the disaster. The officials, like more than two dozen others who provided descriptions of targeting procedures or background information for this story, asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters.

In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error.

This week, a report from the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said that the US had “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military target and that the failure “went beyond negligence.” The US Department of Defense has declined to comment on the report.

Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

On March 12, more than 120 Democrats in the US House wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking about the Minab school strike and the role that artificial intelligence, including Maven Smart System, played in identifying the site as a target. The Pentagon hasn’t responded publicly to such questions, citing the ongoing investigation.

Some of Hegseth’s advisers have expressed concern that political scrutiny of Maven could disrupt the benefits they anticipate from its further adoption, according to officials involved in the probe.

No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said. While not mandatory, that sort of review had become routine in recent years, they added. It’s unclear whether such checks, which include mapping the civilian environment, assessing noncombatant presence and developing lower-risk strike options, would have been enough to raise questions about the Minab site.

Payam Akhavan, a Toronto-based lawyer who has practiced before the International Criminal Court and is an expert on civilian protection, said it’s important for investigators to determine what efforts US officials made to try to ensure they were targeting a military installation.

“The Geneva Convention says you must take all feasible measures to determine that this is, in fact, a military objective,” said Akhavan, who spoke before Thursday’s UN report was published. “This does not mean that every mistake is a war crime, because mistakes will be made, even if you take all feasible measures.

“But if all feasible measures were not taken,” he added, “then that raises a question of criminal responsibility.”

In the US, the disaster has become a different sort of political touchstone. Democratic lawmakers, who are seeking to take control of the Congress in November, are asking how the attack could have happened.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the Pentagon of deliberately withholding the results of the investigation, while his Republican counterpart, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, called for congressional briefings on what went wrong.

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