Is this the fastest-moving war in history? For Iran, AI reduced the ‘kill chain’ to seconds

Team TOI PlusTIMESOFINDIA.COM
Mar 5, 2026 | 21:25 IST
Smoke rises after a strike in Tehran on March 2, 2026 (AP)

Without an AI system scanning 150 intelligence sources to identify the ‘best’ targets at breakneck speeds, the strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may not even have been possible

What used to take days or weeks now takes seconds. And that searing speed is what allowed the US to make 900 targeted strikes on Iran in just 12 hours of the opening wave of this war.

The US is relying, quite heavily, on an AI-backed platform, Maven Smart System, to power through reams of classified data — from satellites, from surveillance, more than 150 sources in all — to figure out whom to target, and how. Faster than “the speed of thought”.
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