Earlier this week I was asked by @south_korea_ln about the U.S. military strike that had hit a school in Minab, Iran. When I read the article he tagged me in, I was stunned. I mean, how do you hit a school? Why was a school on a target list? It just did not make any sort of logical sense to me.

There was one thing, though, that at the time I did think about, and it had to do with the protests in January/February. When Iran first shut down the internet, but Starlink was still operational, photos, videos, and just general eyewitness testimony had mentioned that Basij forces were staging at schools (during the protests, schools were closed and classes cancelled, meaning the schools were empty). However, as I had mentioned in my comment back, I did not really know anything about the situation. I had heard some rumblings on social media, but I take that with a grain of salt, and since I had other things going on I had not looked into it.

So I did exactly what I said I was going to do, and in my free time the last few days, I pored over the developments, insights, and talked to people about this situation. Now I feel like I know enough to talk about this and explain my thoughts.

Before I continue, I do want to say a couple of things. First and foremost, any loss of life, even enemy forces, is not something I am over here cheering for and yelling now go get some more. That just is not who I am, and someone I will never be. Second, the loss of a child’s life is even worse and makes me sick. Schools are supposed to be safe no matter where you are in the world.

I am sure as many people have now seen, since major media companies like the New York Times and CNN have reported, that the initial investigation shows it is likely a U.S. strike that caused this. I will go further, though, and say there is no doubt in my mind that this was a U.S. strike. Frankly, when I saw the damage, I knew it couldn't have been an interceptor that misfired, and while, in theory, sure, it could have been an Iranian ballistic missile that failed, let's be real and honest with ourselves: that wasn’t the case. The interceptor idea had some logic, at least as Iran would be trying to stop missiles, but again, the damage was enormous. It's not the type of damage interceptors do.

As part of my process, I then wanted to check the numbers and see if they were realistic. Given that the Iranian Regime is still blacking out the internet, I think it is safe to say that the person you are engaged with militarily has a reason to fudge the numbers depending on the situation. If it is a ton of their troops died, they are going to want to downplay the loss; if it is a civilian loss, they are going to want to increase the loss. Russia and Hamas right now are the undisputed kings of this, and they bend or outright lie about numbers to make their narrative look better and be more palatable for not only the world but their own populations. To be frank, I also hoped that, for some reason, maybe kids were not in the school at the time. That there was some sort of hint or sign that it wasn’t open or the kids had been moved from the school earlier but that was not the case. So there was only one thing to look at next. Why? What was the reason this building had ended up on the target list?

Now, all the reporting I have seen has been pretty consistent in indicating that this building and the areas around it were/are part of a larger IRGC Navy base. While the exact timeline of events is not certain, from what I have seen from several media reports, it is clear that at one point this building was part of the naval installation. Starting in 2015, though, satellite imagery starts showing walls going up separating the school from the base. Later on, we see new entrances and outdoor play areas. Again I want to take a moment to say that this is by no means me justifying what happened but rather it was me trying to just understand and try to see what the military saw.

The picture that emerges is not one I am proud of, and it boils down to a failure in military intel keeping their targeting data, especially regarding military installations, up to date. U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, received the targeting data from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which labeled it as a military target. What I learned reading about this and talking to both friends still in the military and those who have retired is how complex military targeting is. There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and this data is seen by a number of people from various agencies before it is passed along to a 3 Star or higher General for final sign-off. No one caught it, and in my personal opinion, not only can you look at this situation as being too busy, bureaucratic, and just setting yourself up for errors, but it also makes it hard as hell to hold anyone responsible.

At the end of this, someone should be held responsible, and because of what I think is a bureaucratic military system, I do not see how that is even possible, and that is deeply unnerving. During expansive military operations, the huge NATO training exercise, and in war we always see human error it is sadly just part of what goes on when coordinating large forces at one time. It doesn’t make it excusable, and I wish we lived in a world where this would not be the case, but we are talking about humans and humanity, a messy messy thing that comes with errors.

In all of these report readings and sifting through different things that I would start to question while I was looking into this, I ran into a couple of things that either A) were coming up in the media reporting or B) were things I saw on social media that need to be addressed, and I can from my work address them to some extent.

The first one is people thinking that AI is to blame for this tragedy. I have seen a disturbing number of people who are borderline hyping this up as if it were some sort of Skynet-type incident. The plain fact of the matter is that Claude, for as good an AI model as it is, is nowhere near good enough to be compared to that, and even in the military usage of Claude, there is heavy human involvement. All targets that get identified still have a human look at them before any action takes place. It needs to be noted as well that there is no evidence, or even a hint, that this is the case, but people are starting to say some wild stuff, and I wanted to just acknowledge it and share what I know from working in the AI space.

The other thing is that people on the internet are saying the school was hit in a double-tap strike. That could not be further from the truth. Based on people on the ground who gave public interviews, the school was hit a single time by a single missile. Now it seems like roughly 4 strikes total were in this first wave. One hit the school, three hit the military base, and then a few hours later, the military base was struck again. A double-tap is when you hit the same target, so in this case, the school, but you put a 20ish-minute break in there so that you kill the first responders. That wasn’t the case at all the first wave, the missiles all hit right around the same time, then it was two hours later at different targets.

Was this a terrible tragedy? Absolutely, there was a critical failure in the review process that the military needs to acknowledge and address. People who have claimed or compared this to the Russian invasion of Ukraine are comparing two dramatically different things. While Russia regularly bombs civilians, be it their homes, markets, etc., this is the one instance that we are hearing about a strike clearly hitting a protected space. With over 5,000 strikes conducted, it is increasingly clear that this was an accident, not a systemic flaw.

I do not want to sound like I am downplaying the strike as the loss of life is horrific, but given the scale of things, the U.S. military has done a remarkable job. They have successfully identified and struck military targets, destroying and/or disabling the infrastructure that was allowing Iran to rebuild its missile stockpile, nuclear ambitions, and fund/export resources to its terror proxies. This is my line of thinking. Feel free to disagree, but I can sleep peacefully at night knowing this.

cc @Signal312 @billytheked @SimpleStacker @justin_shocknet @Undisciplined @denlillaapan @Scoresby