Katrina Manson is a national-security journalist at Bloomberg and the author of Project Maven (W.W. Norton, 2026, 416 pages, $31.99), a book documenting the U.S. military's AI-targeting system. The book reconstructs how Project Maven fuses photo, text, radio, and electromagnetic-pulse intelligence to identify roughly 5,000 targets per day across U.S. military operations.
Project Maven (2026)
Project Maven traces the program from its early deployments through its later integration into the kill chain. Manson follows its operational milestones from Somalia (2017) to Afghanistan (2018), the Google employee walkout over the program (2018), Palantir's emergence as the anchor contractor, the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (2019), the killing of Qassem Suleimani (2020), the Kabul evacuation (2021), and industrial-scale targeting in Ukraine (2022, where the program ran a roughly $1 million per month cloud bill). The book then turns to on-weapon algorithms — among them systems Manson identifies as Goalkeeper and Whiplash — developed in preparation for a possible Pacific theater conflict.
Manson reports several quantitative measures of the system's scale and reliability: roughly 5,000 targets identified per day; targeting accuracy of about 70% in Afghanistan falling to about 30% in the Philippines; approximately 10 false detections per square kilometer in Ukraine; and a portfolio of more than 1,500 algorithms later narrowed to about two dozen.
The book includes a personnel portrait of Drew Cukor, the Marine officer who founded Maven, who was reprimanded for the program's culture and whose intensity Manson describes as shaping its development. Manson quotes General Chris Donahue, commander of American land forces in Europe, as saying: "Ultimately, all this stuff will become automated."
Project Maven is a primary source for documentation of operationally deployed AI in warfare, with empirical figures drawn from it appearing on Autonomous Weapons, Defense / Military — AI Deployment, and Palantir Technologies.
Reception
In a May 14, 2026 review, The Economist described Project Maven as "one of the most important books on war and technology in many years" (The AI that transformed American warfare (Economist, May 14 2026) — review of Manson's Project Maven).
Relationships
- author-of: Project Maven (W.W. Norton, 2026)
- subject-of: The AI that transformed American warfare (Economist, May 14 2026) — review of Manson's Project Maven (Economist review)
- related: Drew Cukor (Maven founder; primary subject), Autonomous Weapons, Palantir Technologies, DOD — Department of Defense (AI Deployer)