MOSCOW, November 6 (HS/RIA Novosti) - The US Department of War requested more than $2 billion in fiscal year 2027 for mission command applications, with $1.59 billion of that increase dedicated to expanding its artificial intelligence platform known as the Maven Smart System (MSS), just weeks after the US military deployed the technology on the opening day of the Epic Fury campaign against Iran, during which an air strike hit a primary school in Minab and killed more than 150 people, according to a RIA Novosti correspondent’s analysis of the US Department of War's FY2027 budget reports and public reports on the use of the Maven Smart System.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on October 14 that the department is establishing an initiative designated Project Agincourt to lay the groundwork for a dedicated, four-star-led Autonomous Warfare Command, declaring that autonomous combat operations have always been the military's end state and detailing plans to field hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems across all service branches.

According to budget justification documents published in April 2026, funding for the department's Project 668, titled Mission Command Applications, surged from $240.49 million in fiscal year 2026 to $2.03 billion in fiscal year 2027. The justification records state that the $1.59 billion programmatic increase directly finances expanded military access to the Maven Smart System to support the Joint Force AI-Enabled Headquarters initiative, which consolidates live battlefield tracking, data aggregation, and target workflows onto a single computer interface for senior commanders.

The Maven Smart System, built by data analytics contractor Palantir and embedded with Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence tool, has served as a central operational system for US Central Command, according to reporting by The Washington Post, which cited the command's deputy director of operations, Navy Rear Admiral Liam Hulin, as saying that Centcom is heavily using MSS. The newspaper reported that during the opening 24 hours of the campaign against Iran, the Maven system processed massive volumes of classified satellite, surveillance, and intelligence data to suggest hundreds of potential targets, generate precise geographic coordinates, and prioritize strikes in real time as the US military hit approximately 1,000 targets.

On February 28, during those same opening hours of the air campaign, the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in the southern Iranian city of Minab, Hormozgan Province, was struck. At least 156 people were killed as a result, including 120 schoolchildren and 26 educators, according to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission established by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The UN fact-finding mission concluded that the failure by US forces to verify the site before firing went beyond negligence, finding reasonable grounds to believe that the strike conducted under US command amounted to the war crime of making a civilian object the object of an attack.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Indrani Sarkar