Speed became a monthly metric, and 13,000 targets took 38 days

Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the US Department of Defense, told the Billington Cybersecurity summit that America's closest allies cannot keep pace, The Guardian reports. They lack the resources, the experience and the scale, he said, and Washington is working with NATO and the Five Eyes so they avoid the same mistakes.

Four numbers from his remarks and their surroundings say more than the diplomacy does.

• 13,000 targets struck in the first 38 days of the 2026 air campaign against Iran, on Stanley's own figure from May.
• 1.7 million users on GenAI.mil, the internal chatbot launched since January.
• One monthly metric that Pete Hegseth ordered Stanley's office to report: AI deployment speed.
• More than 120 members of Congress signed a letter demanding answers on civilian casualties and the use of AI.

One target every four minutes

Divide the first by the second and the campaign averaged 342 targets a day. Run that around the clock and it comes to one target every four minutes and twelve seconds, sustained for five and a half weeks.

That rate is the point of the tooling. Since January the office also launched Agent Network, built to shorten the time between intelligence-gathering and a commander's decision; an AI agent aimed at that particular gap is a different object from a chatbot. Project Maven began in 2017 and became the Palantir-built Maven Smart System, which Stanley said in March lets a commander move from identifying a target to launching a strike inside one platform.

Stanley described a commander stopping a scheduled briefing to take a thirty-second call and issuing an order on the spot, with no formal decision brief and no check on the clearance level of the room. He called the moment revolutionary.

“The way we've always done it is the most risky course of action.”

— Cameron Stanley, The Guardian, 9 September 2026

Cameron Stanley, chief digital and AI officer, Department of Defense. Source: The Guardian, 9 September 2026

The question that has waited 192 days

Read that alongside the fourth number. The congressional letter followed a strike on an elementary school in Minab on 28 February, which Iranian officials say killed at least 168 people, many of them children. The Pentagon has not answered publicly, and 192 days have passed.

We are reporting the sequence, not asserting a link between that strike and any particular system. The letter asks about civilian casualties and the use of AI together, and the answer to it has not arrived.

Hegseth turned deployment speed into a monthly number that Stanley's office must report. An organisation measures what it wants more of, and nothing in the reporting describes a matching monthly metric for review, verification or error rate.

Stanley closed by calling the department's old habits its biggest liability, saying the way it has always done things is now the most risky course of action.

Where this sits against the other AI arguments

Two days ago we wrote about Westminster debating a ban on artificial superintelligence, and about an Anthropic researcher resigning over the pace of the race. Those arguments run on a scale of decades. This one runs on a monthly report, and it is already deployed.

The allies Stanley says cannot keep pace are being offered the tooling and the lessons. The metric that comes with them measures how fast the tooling arrives, and the office publishing it is the same one asking Congress for patience.

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