Nearly 900 Strikes in 12 Hours: Is AI Rewriting War?
News Desk
Islamabad: Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the modern battlefield, with defense analysts warning that the accelerating use of AI-powered systems could fundamentally alter how wars are fought, and how decisions to strike are made.
Recent media reports claim that nearly 900 attacks were carried out within the first 12 hours of US and Israeli operations against Iran, underscoring the speed and scale at which modern military campaigns can now unfold.
Experts say such tempo would be difficult to sustain without advanced automation and AI-assisted targeting systems.
The growing role of AI has also been observed in the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in drone warfare, surveillance and intelligence analysis.
Ukraine, for instance, has integrated AI tools to enhance targeting accuracy and battlefield awareness in its fight against Russia.
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According to reports, during “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran, the United States Department of Defense sought assistance from AI systems developed by the San Francisco-based company Anthropic. The collaboration reportedly aimed to accelerate war planning and intelligence processing.
Defense analysts explain that AI shortens the so-called “kill chain”, the sequence from identifying a target to obtaining legal approval and executing a strike.
By automating data analysis and target verification, AI systems can compress this process to unprecedented speeds, sometimes described by experts as faster than human cognition.
Professor David Leslie of Queen Mary University of London described the shift as the dawn of a new era in military strategy.
However, he cautioned against overreliance on automated systems, warning of “decision compression,” where human oversight risks becoming a mere formality, a phenomenon he characterized as cognitive offloading.
The debate intensified after disagreements reportedly surfaced between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
While the company provided AI models to the Defense Department in 2024 to assist with planning and intelligence tasks, it has publicly maintained that its technology should not be deployed in fully autonomous weapons without meaningful human oversight.
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Anthropic has also voiced concerns about potential misuse of AI for large-scale internal surveillance.
Some reports suggest that the dispute led to temporary restrictions affecting the company’s access to certain federal engagements.
Security experts argue that AI is transforming warfare by prioritizing speed, real-time data processing and automated responses.
Yet the rapid evolution of such systems has sparked urgent ethical and legal questions about accountability, civilian protection and compliance with international humanitarian law.
As global powers expand their AI capabilities, the central question remains whether humans will retain meaningful control over life-and-death decisions — or whether the accelerating pace of technological warfare will gradually sideline human judgment in favor of machine-driven command.
