> Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse snip

it could be both, but we know no. 2, the complete disregard for the lives of civilians, is in play because, whatever else was going on, america was initiating war for the purpose of destabilizing a country, afaict at least, the reasoning has been unclear. destablize means to try to make things fuck up, and that tends to kill people. what people? how? who knows? things fucking up means out of control. at that point it's up to physics, not people.

it's like, if i set a house on fire, then later defended that action by claiming to have not known where i started the fire was a nursery.

back in the war on terror days america had a habit of blowing up weddings, and then claiming it was an accident. and i would think, accident how? did the missile fire itself?

I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.

The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.

I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).

It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.

In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.

I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.

You have clearly articulated what I’ve personally explained to people. Thank you for that. The nature of the strikes as a part of a thoroughly pre-planned surprise attack lays the entire blame at the planners, approvers and those who executed the strike.

The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?

The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.

Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…

We learned that Israel was going to strike, so the US decided to jump on board. Do we know how long of a notice Israel gave the US? What you're attributing to as a thought out plan of attack seems to imply plenty of time. I don't think it's unreasonable for Israel to have learned of the meeting with little notice, deliberated internally for however long, and then told the US about it with not much time. I could totally see where under current Pentagon leadership, three clicks would have been the reaction. Yes, the US had been saber rattling and building pressure. That's probably part of why the Iranian leadership decided to meet. Whatever plans the US might have had went out the window when Israel called up and said we're striking now.

I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.

This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.

I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.

Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.

In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.

While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.

I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.

And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.

It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.

Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlh...

I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?

> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.

How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.

Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.

But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.