Why won’t the Pentagon say if it’s using AI to blow up boats in the Caribbean?
The Pentagon has an AI system built to find small boats in dark waters, and refuses to say whether it helped pick the targets.
As always, to support my reporting and keep it free for everyone, you can become a paid subscriber. Thank you.
The longer the war with Iran drags on, the more the once-shocking attacks closer to our shores fade into memory. Since September 2025, the US military has fired on 66 small speedboats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that it accuses of drug trafficking. It is the most sustained lethal campaign the United States has ever waged outside a declared war.
President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth publicized the strikes relentlessly on social media, posting overhead sensor imagery of the strikes in ghostly relief, accompanied by stark warnings. “If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda. Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you,” Hegseth declared in October 2025. And so they did, killing 221 people.
Reporters and outside analysts have pored over these images and, from them, deduced the MX-series infrared sensors that captured the footage, the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles used in the strikes, the MQ-9 Reaper drones that fired them, and the bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico from which they were launched.
Much about the strikes remains a mystery, including whether they marked a new chapter in the history of the world’s most powerful military as it began killing with the help of artificial intelligence.
The Pentagon has an AI system designed to detect small boats crossing the dark waters. It’s called Maven—officially the Maven Smart System, built by Palantir—and it has a documented history with the same command now running the strikes. The US military’s Southern Command, which carries out the boat strikes and oversees all other operations in Central and South America, has used Maven for years.
Palantir’s own marketing materials confirm it. A Maven Smart System product sheet lists Southcom among the command’s current deployments. The same document lists the tools Palantir built inside Maven that identify and manage targets—Maverick AI, Target Workbench, and Target Nexus. The system’s computer-vision component, called Broad Area Surveillance and Targeting (BAS-T), can digest hundreds of kilometers of imagery at once and deliver “automated object detection” into that targeting pipeline. Once a target is identified, Maven generates a menu of options for how to hit the target—which drone, which missile, which weapon—and lets the operator pick one.
Right-click, left-click, fire
Southcom, whose area of operations covers nearly one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, has wanted this capability for a long time. In 2009, then-Southcom commander Admiral James Stavridis told the Senate that “broad-area surveillance” of the region’s “vast open ocean and extensive coastlines” was the command’s greatest need. “No one sensor system can address this target adequately,” he said.
Maven, which is Yiddish for expert, began in 2016 as the Pentagon’s answer to a specific problem: humans staring at drone feeds for hours at a stretch missed things. The idea was to use AI to do the tedious job of scanning footage and identifying targets. Over the next decade, the project grew from a computer-vision tool for airborne surveillance into a fusion platform that pulls feeds from drones, satellites, radar, and other sensors into a single display. As Maven came into wider use, its developer, Palantir—a company founded by Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp, an excitable German philosophy PhD—became the most valuable defense contractor in the world.
In her 2026 book Project Maven, journalist Katrina Manson quoted an unnamed official with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which manages the Maven Smart System. Maven, the official said, has assisted “in the detection, classification, and ultimate interdiction of more than three dozen vessels suspected of engaging in illicit or clandestine activity.” The official noted that NGA—presumably Maven and AI—can classify a vessel three times faster than a human analyst. Asked about Manson’s reporting, NGA referred questions to the Pentagon, where an official told The After-Action Report, “The department does not comment on matters of intelligence, capabilities or effects.”
Cameron Stanley, Southcom’s former science and technology adviser, also told Manson that the command “previously used Maven to identify a drug-running vessel that was subsequently boarded.”
Since then, the technology has been integrated into Southcom’s operations by CACI Inc., according to job and LinkedIn postings for positions based on-site at the command’s Doral, Florida, headquarters that The After-Action Report reviewed. One, for an “Operations Integrator/Maven Smart System,” seeks a candidate to “modernize” Southcom’s Common Intelligence Picture and Common Operating Picture—the systems commanders use to see the battlefield and make decisions. A person who holds that job at Southcom, according to his LinkedIn profile, is Leo Kryszewski, a former Green Beret whose archived online biography states he previously served in the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the US Army’s Office of Military Support, a secret intelligence unit also known as Task Force Orange. Neither CACI nor Kryszewski returned messages left seeking comment.
Stanley, too, has moved on. Today, he is the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, responsible for delivering Maven system access to Southcom and other combatant commands. In March 2026, Stanley demonstrated how it worked on stage at Palantir’s AIPCon conference. “Left click, right click, left click,” he told the audience, walking them through what appeared to be Palantir’s Target Workbench screens. “Magically it becomes a detection.”
Stanley told another conference that Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran that began in late February, “leveraged” the Maven Smart System “to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days.” Left unsaid was whether one of those targets was a primary school in southern Iran that was mistakenly hit while bombing an adjoining Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base. An estimated 175 people, many of them children, were killed.
Palantir has said that, given Maven’s current configuration in the Defense Department, the decision to fire rests with a human. Louis Mosley, the company’s UK and Europe head, told the BBC in April that despite Maven’s “instrumental” role in the Iran war, responsibility for its output always rests with the customer. “There’s always a human in the loop, so there is always a human that makes the ultimate decision. That’s the current set-up,” he said.
The empire strikes back
While the Defense Department is proud of Maven’s use in targeting Iran, it has been conspicuously silent about whether Maven is helping Southcom blow up boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
Asked directly whether Maven or any AI-assisted system played a role in the strikes, a Southcom spokesperson declined to say. “For operational security reasons, the specific tools and tactical procedures utilized in active targeting operations are non-disclosable,” the spokesperson said. “Targeting decisions are deliberate, informed by comprehensive assessments, and vetted through established joint review processes.”
The boat strikes began September 2, 2025, when the US military, acting on Trump’s orders, killed 11 people aboard a vessel Trump said was carrying members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Two shipwrecked survivors seen clinging to the wreckage were killed minutes later in a follow-on “double tap” strike ordered by Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, then commander of Joint Special Operations Command. (A source familiar with the operations said Special Operations Command was adamant that it did not use Maven in the strikes.)
The strikes were first announced by Trump and later by Hegseth directly. Southcom did not begin issuing its own release announcing them until December. Those releases attributed the strikes to Hegseth's direction, a pattern that held through 35 strikes and 126 deaths. By February, that language had changed: Southcom’s releases began attributing strikes to the direction of the new commander, General Francis Donovan, instead. There have been 29 strikes since then, killing 95 people. The last occurred June 21 in the Caribbean, according to a tally by The New York Times.
The closest that a senior Defense official has come to acknowledging that AI played a role in the boat strikes came in a March 19 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, asked General Donovan for a commitment that he would not use AI in a decision to use lethal force.
“Senator, we were involved in a process last night, the targeting process,” Donovan replied. “There were only humans involved. The data was helping us make decisions.”
Donovan was apparently referring to a March 19 strike on a “low-profile vessel” that Southcom said was engaged in drug trafficking and was operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” The command said three “narcoterrorists” survived the strike. Costa Rican authorities told The Associated Press that the strike left two people dead and one seriously injured.
“And in a closed setting,” Donovan continued, “I’d like to share with you watching these young Americans make really hard decisions. They made the right decisions in the end.”
Not everyone saw lethal force as the only solution to the drug problem. While JSOC and Southcom have been busy blowing up suspected drug-smuggling vessels, the US Coast Guard continued boarding and seizing them—without killing the crew—as it had for years before the strikes began. The Coast Guard operation, called Operation Pacific Viper, has seized more than 225,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific since the operation first began in August 2025.
How, then, does the military decide which boats to strike and which to seize? A lethal strike is green-lit by a “Designated Terrorist Organization” (DTO) designation, which allows Southcom to target the group’s “members, affiliates, and vessels for strikes in international waters,” according to the command’s response to the Defense Department’s Inspector General. Once a group is designated, Donovan said, “any action we take, whether that’s enhanced counter narcotics or a maritime strike,” is tied to that designation. The strikes are carried out by a newly named unit, Joint Task Force Southern Spear, as part of what is officially known as Operation Southern Spear.
A Southcom spokesperson told The After-Action Report that “Every narcoterrorist killed in Operation Southern Spear operations was an affiliated member of a Designated Terrorist Organization actively transporting illicit material along known trafficking routes in international waters.”
That sweeping claim, which has been repeated with each strike, was made without a single name, any public evidence, or an explanation of how, boat by boat, that certainty is reached. It is the factual basis justifying 221 deaths, and Southcom won't say how it's made.
Much of the operation is shrouded in secrecy. The Justice Department’s legal opinion determining that the United States was in “non-international armed conflict” with Designated Terrorist Organizations is classified. So is the full list of DTOs. So is the mission statement for the strikes. And when the Pentagon’s own Inspector General asked, Southcom said it could not release its “measures of effectiveness for assessing the conduct of OSS,” nor could it provide a full accounting of the personnel, ships, and air assets deployed to the region. The whole operation is effectively a black box, and a supine GOP-led Congress has been content to leave it alone.
Lethalitymaxxing
General Donovan has made no bones about the role AI plays in his operations. Southcom’s forces, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, “fully maximize operational maneuver, autonomous systems, and human machine teaming to greatly increase lethality, all domain awareness, and, most importantly, data sharing for US and partner forces.” Humans may make the final decision to use lethal force, but in Donovan’s own account, the AI makes the military more deadly. Southcom aims to be at the forefront of this military revolution. The command is establishing an autonomous warfare command
If anything, it would be surprising if the command weren’t using Maven in the boat strikes. Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who has represented sources inside the US military and intelligence community for two decades, said the circumstantial case that Maven is being used in the boat strikes is strong.
“The speed of target identification suggests AI-assisted sensor fusion,” she told me.
She pointed to the nature of the targets. “This campaign relies on detecting small, fast boats over vast maritime areas,” she said. “This is exactly the sort of problem—processing drone video, aircraft imagery, radar, AIS [trackers that broadcast a civilian vessel’s identity, location, and speed], satellite imagery and other sensor feeds—that Project Maven was originally developed and deployed to assist with.”
Radack also pointed to the Pentagon’s own recent public statements about Maven: that the system is no longer limited to counterterrorism, that it is being pushed out to combatant commands across the department, and that the Pentagon has asked Congress for still more money to expand it. Bloomberg reported in May that the command asked Congress for an additional $3 million for Maven in 2027 to “support increased mission sets” as part of its unfunded priorities list.
The command’s own language, she noted, points in the same direction. “Southcom has repeatedly said that intelligence ‘confirmed’ boats were engaged in narco-trafficking before strikes on fast-moving, small vessels that can be difficult to track manually,” she said.
This is the sort of pattern-of-life conclusion that requires sifting through drone feeds and data streams too large for humans to work through alone. “The fast, consistent, unrelenting tempo of these extrajudicial strikes smacks of AI-assisted analysis,” she said.
Her conclusion: “They brag about these strikes and post trophy videos publicly. I’d like to hear them deny that they’re using Maven because the indicia say strongly that they are.”
At what cost
For all their technological wizardry, the boat strikes have not measurably reduced the flow of drugs to the United States. General Donovan admitted as much to the Senate in March, saying “I cannot stand before you and tell you that there’s a percentage drop in American deaths in the United States or a number of a certain percentage of drugs reaching the United States.” Cartels have adapted, he said, by using air transport and shipping containers rather than small boats, and journalists have found cocaine supplies and prices are unchanged.
What they have produced is 221 bodies and a growing catalog of trophy videos on the president’s social media feed that have come at the cost of $647 million (and counting) through March 31, not to mention a permanent stain on a military that once prided itself on following the rules. That’s a fraction of the $37.5 billion cost of the war against Iran, but Iran at least could defend itself.
The boat strikes are attacks on unarmed civilians—criminals, perhaps, but civilians nonetheless. A former State Department lawyer argued in Foreign Policy this month that the boat strikes were more than war crimes. They are “crimes against humanity.”
The Pentagon’s silence about AI and the boat strikes is telling. Confirming that a machine helped pick these civilian targets would mean acknowledging what the campaign actually is: an algorithm sorting through video to help decide which fishermen, mules, and low-level couriers get incinerated at sea. Not the cartel bosses, but the people at the bottom rung of the ladder—the most expendable and easiest to replace.
That is something the young Americans who made what General Donovan called the “right decisions” leading to a strike will have to reckon with for the rest of their lives.