Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare
by Katrina Manson
View on GoodreadsIn 2017 a small team met in a windowless Pentagon room to put AI at the center of how America fights. Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson follows Marine Colonel Drew Cukor's startup-style push to field targeting algorithms in live wars, drawing on more than 200 interviews to ask whether AI makes war more precise or scales its mistakes.
Core ideas
- Military AI arrived through a bureaucratic insurgency, not a grand strategy: a small team ran Maven like a startup and pushed untested algorithms into combat before the Pentagon's own processes would allow
- The Pentagon could not build AI alone, so Maven's real battle was enlisting a reluctant Silicon Valley, and the fight over Google's participation reshaped how tech firms deal with defense work
- Deployment exposed where AI fails as much as where it works, and those lessons now feed autonomous weapons, leaving open whether machine-speed targeting saves lives or produces errors at scale
Published2026
ISBN9781324123316
ReadOct 2026
