Whether data centers or targeted bombs, don’t let AI make our decisions | Opinion

In 1999, I was working at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency when American bombs struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people died. Dozens were wounded. It wasn’t a failure of precision. The bombs hit exactly where they were aimed. It was a failure of intelligence. The targeting data was wrong. The database was outdated. And despite every institutional safeguard we had in place — lawyers, analysts, oversight, chain of command — we still killed people we never meant to kill.

I participated in the after-action investigation. I know what it looks like when good people, inside a system with real safeguards, still get it catastrophically wrong.

I’ve been thinking about Belgrade a lot lately.

On Feb. 28, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, Iran, killing at least 156 people, most of them schoolchildren between 7 and 12 years old. Once again, the bombs were precise. Once again, the intelligence was not. The building had been misclassified in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that hadn’t been updated to reflect its separation from an adjacent military compound.

But this time, something was profoundly different.

In 1999, building a target list required thousands of analysts working over days and weeks, with lawyers at every step reviewing compliance with the laws of war. In 2026, an artificial intelligence-assisted targeting system called Maven generated approximately 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, with a staff of roughly 20 people.

The system didn’t fail. The oversight did. And that oversight had been deliberately dismantled.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had publicly declared there would be “no stupid rules of engagement.” The Pentagon’s top military lawyers had been fired months earlier. Their entire job was to ask the hard questions before bombs fall. The president had stated openly that international law didn’t apply to him.

What I learned from Belgrade is that the safeguards aren’t bureaucratic red tape. They are the difference between a mistake you can learn from and a war crime you can’t take back. They exist precisely because wars move fast, databases go stale and human beings make errors. Slow the targeting cycle down, and you catch things. Speed it up without accountability, and you get Minab.

Danger of deregulation for efficiency

AI is now embedded in life-and-death military decisions. It runs at machine speed. And the institutions built to provide oversight are being deliberately hollowed out. The administration that fired the Pentagon’s lawyers is the same one pushing to deregulate AI, all in the name of efficiency.

I spent decades believing that American power, exercised with discipline and accountability, could be a force for good in the world. I still believe that. But power without accountability isn’t strength. It’s recklessness. And recklessness at machine speed kills children in schools.

My faith teaches that we are accountable for what we do with power entrusted to us, and for what we allow to be done in our name.

So here’s what I’m asking:

Call your representatives. Demand hearings on AI use in military targeting. Demand they restore the legal oversight that was gutted. Congress has constitutional authority over war powers. It’s time they used it.

Ask hard questions about AI in your own community. The energy demands driving military AI are the same demands bringing hyperscale data centers into cities around the U.S., often without public input or accountability.

Vote for people who take oversight seriously. Ask every candidate where they stand on AI accountability, war powers and congressional oversight. These aren’t abstract questions anymore.

Those children deserved the protection our safeguards exist to provide. So do the men and women still serving. So do we.

We cannot move at machine speed toward a future we haven’t thought through. I’ve seen what happens when we do.

Patricia Setari is a U.S. Army veteran who spent 30 years as a national security professional at the Department of Defense and participated in the after-action investigation following the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing. She lives in suburban Kansas City.