Pentagon review blames overreliance on Palantir's Maven, plus a 10-to-1 cut in CENTCOM civilian-harm staff, for the Minab school strike
An unreleased Pentagon review reported by Bloomberg finds that CENTCOM leaned on Palantir's Maven Smart System when it cleared the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab as a day-one target on February 28. The strike killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. Maven had surfaced the site from IRGC records that were years out of date. An analyst flagged in 2019 that the site had changed, but that warning went into a system not connected to the authoritative targeting database. CENTCOM's civilian-harm team had been cut from ten people to one, so nobody from that team reviewed the target. A Bloomberg follow-up on September 22 says CENTCOM is now changing target-vetting workflows, adding open-source civilian-movement feeds and making dozens of Maven upgrades, while Palantir says it is 'not responsible for the underlying data.' Builder takeaway: this is the clearest real-world case so far of a decision-support model acting as a stale-data amplifier, where the failure sat in database connections and in the human review that had been removed.
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