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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ve 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,\u201d said Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the DoD. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s chief commercial officer Ted Mabrey told the AIPCON audience that the analytics software company is supporting Operation Epic Fury.<\/p>\n
“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\u2019s to ships at sea and subs in the water,” he said, referring to Vice Admiral Seiko Okano, who also spoke.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He said Maven began in 2016 when commanders were looking for what the military called \u201cthe third offset,\u201d with \u201coffset\u201d 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\u2019s where Maven came in.<\/p>\n
Google was the original partner<\/a> on the project but quit the work in 2018 due to employee protests.<\/p>\n It took seven years, but Maven Smart System, as Palantir calls it, has consolidated \u201ceight or nine\u201d systems for decision makers to look at into a \u201csingle visualization tool,\u201d Stanley said. Maven allows operators to select data and move it into a workflow where commanders can determine how best \u201cto prosecute\u201d the target, he said.<\/p>\n Palantir architect Chad Wahlquist added that data, logic, and action are all orchestrated through Maven.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw stats where normally we would have 2,000 intelligence officers, actually trying to do targeting and look at stuff. Now that\u2019s 20 and they\u2019re doing it in rapid succession as well,\u201d Wahlquist said. \u201cSo, that, doing more with less, is really enabling the warfighter to really keep everyone safe and really go after the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n During Thursday\u2019s 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 \u201ccollapsing the kill chain.\u201d Dods compared it to reducing the hay in a haystack when hunting the needle.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cHQ.\u201d One of the marks was positioned on an area of the map that corresponds to Minab<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maven\u2019s capabilities keep US service members alive, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cPalantir is very helpful in delivering this. Maven Smart System is an incredible system,\u201d Stanley said. \u201cNo fair fights. If I can avoid it, let’s not have fair fights. Our guys win and we come home.\u201d<\/p>\n