US-Israeli AI advantage has not translated into strategic victory against Iran, Tasnim says
Shafaq News
An analysis published by Tasnim News Agency, an Iranian state-affiliated outlet, argues that US and Israeli forces have achieved clear tactical superiority over Iran through artificial intelligence-driven warfare, but have failed to convert that advantage into strategic success — a conclusion the agency attributes to the fundamental limitations of AI at the level of political and military strategy.
The analysis describes the current conflict as what experts cited by Tasnim call the first large-scale AI-driven war, noting that systems such as Maven — a US military AI platform designed to process drone imagery and electronic signals — have allowed American and Israeli forces to identify more targets in less time, execute strikes with greater precision, and compress the interval between target identification and action.
Tasnim argues, however, that these tactical gains have not produced strategic outcomes, contending that AI systems are structurally incapable of answering the questions that determine the course of a war: whether escalation serves or undermines a given objective, whether a military action deters an adversary or hardens its resolve, and what level of sustained pressure remains manageable without triggering uncontrolled escalation.
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The agency cites discussions at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as supporting the view that deploying AI at the strategic level faces serious and unresolved difficulties.
In contrast, the analysis frames Iran's conduct in the conflict as an exercise in what it terms natural intelligence at the strategic level —defined as decision-making grounded in historical experience, regional environmental knowledge, adversary psychology, and the capacity to manage political and social complexity. It cites Iran's management of tension levels, its use of the Strait of Hormuz as an economic pressure lever, and its avoidance of uncontrolled escalation as evidence of strategic judgment that AI cannot replicate.
The analysis also warns of what it calls the illusion of control —a condition in which commanders, given access to precise real-time data and rapid decision-making tools, develop an overconfidence in their ability to manage the battlefield, while deeper layers of conflict, including political dynamics, social cohesion, and the psychology of war, remain beyond algorithmic reach. Tasnim draws on historical precedent, citing US military engagements in Vietnam and Iraq as cases where operational precision failed to compensate for the absence of coherent strategic objectives.
The piece concludes that tactical success and strategic stalemate are not contradictory in AI-era warfare but are in fact its defining feature, and that the decisive factor in modern conflict remains human judgment, the capacity to manage uncertainty, and the ability to understand complexity —qualities it attributes to Iran's conduct in the current war.
