WSJ wsj.com By
Daniel Michaels
and
Dov Lieber

March 7, 2026 12:00 pm ET

The U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran have unfolded at unprecedented speed and precision thanks to months of planning, a massive assemblage of military force and a cutting-edge weapon never before deployed on this scale: artificial intelligence.

AI tools are helping gather intelligence, pick targets, plan bombing missions and assess battle damage at speeds not previously possible. AI helps commanders manage supplies of everything from ammunition to spare parts and lets them choose the best weapon for each objective.

Before Israeli jet fighters launched ballistic missiles that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at his residence a week ago, launching the current regional war, Israeli intelligence services had for years been monitoring hacked Tehran traffic cameras and eavesdropping on senior officials’ communications—increasingly relying on AI to sift through a flood of intercepts.

The use of AI in the campaign against Iran follows years of work by the Pentagon and lessons learned from other militaries. Ukraine—with U.S. help—increasingly relies on AI in its war against Russia. Israel has tapped AI in conflicts at least since the October 2023 Hamas attacks.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urged accelerated adoption of AI to create “an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force.” At the same time, he is engaging in a public battle with Anthropic, a critical AI supplier, and the Pentagon has contracted with rival OpenAI to use its models in classified settings. President Trump has ordered the government to stop using Anthropic’s products. But U.S. officials say the fight unfolding in Iran is showing the usefulness of Anthropic’s AI agent, Claude.

The U.S. and Israel have declined to discuss exactly how they are employing AI in the widening conflict, but recent comments from military leaders and technical experts provide a window.

Most military AI applications aim to give commanders and planners more complete information, faster than is now possible. That, in turn, should let them make better and quicker decisions than the enemy can, gaining a battlefield advantage.

The U.S. says it has struck more than 3,000 targets in Iran since the attacks began Saturday, using an array of weapons including attack drones launched from ships, F-22 jet fighters taking off from Israel and B-2 stealth bombers flying from the U.S.

While the complexity of managing so many aircraft and weapons is getting a boost from AI, its use remains limited and the cost of badly informed decisions remains high. U.S. military investigators believe American forces likely were responsible for a strike on the war’s first day that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Talk of military AI can conjure images of killer robots, but the reality is that its biggest uses now are often off the battlefield, in time-consuming and labor-intensive fields like intelligence, mission planning and logistics.

These noncombat areas are ripe for AI-inspired efficiency because out of every 10 people in the military, at most two face combat. Up to 90% of personnel are in support roles.

The Pentagon’s AI tools are similar to ChatGPT and other mass-market large language models, but limited to warfare and trained to tackle specific tasks using relevant information, seeking to avoid glitches and inaccuracies often besetting AI.

Still, war is among the most chaotic and complex human endeavors—posing unique problems for even the cutting edge of robotic thinking. The Pentagon’s first AI chief, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, said building military AI is tough in part because much of the available data for training is out of date or unclear.

“The Department of Defense was built as a hardware company in the industrial age, and it has struggled to become a digital company in a software-centric era,” said Shanahan, who oversaw an AI-powered project in Iraq, dubbed Maven, almost a decade ago.

Military strikes start with intelligence. Gathering and parsing it can require thousands of analysts grinding for hours over communications intercepts, photographs and radar images as they try to divine the locations of missile launchers, tunnels and other targets.

Human analysts can examine at most 4% of the intelligence material that is typically collected, say U.S. officers who have worked in the field.

“The biggest immediate impact of AI is in intelligence,” said Israeli Col. Yishai Kohn, the defense ministry’s head of planning, economics and IT. “Many potential missions simply never happened because the manpower didn’t exist” to assess vital intelligence, said Kohn.

AI-powered machine vision can now quickly find vast numbers of targets—with the ability to single out specific models of aircraft or vehicles. It can listen for and summarize relevant conversations from intercepts.

“Intelligence agencies already have access to tons of video data, and current AI enables them to detect exactly what they need within an ocean of data,” said Matan Goldner, chief executive of Conntour, an Israeli company selling software to its and other countries’ security agencies that allows them to query video databases the same way LLMs are used to find patterns in texts.

Just as with mass-market AI, users can bore into results with queries, such as to identify every missile launcher located near a hospital. They can also set the system to alert when an event happens, such as “Tell me every time someone takes a photo near this military base.”

The U.S. Army’s 18th Airborne Corps, using software from data company Palantir Technologies in a continuing string of exercises dubbed Scarlet Dragon, matched its own record from Iraq as the military’s most efficient targeting operation ever, according to Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Thanks to AI, the corps achieved that with only 20 people, compared with more than 2,000 staffers employed in Iraq, she said.

Militaries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are using AI to track Russia’s shadow fleet of tankers, scanning millions of square miles several times a day for vessels that are illegally transferring fuel at sea, said French Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s top officer for digital transformation. Imagery is then linked to ship identities for closer tracking and potential action, he said.

Vandier said AI is turning military intelligence analysis from a task of groping in darkness for targets to one of sifting through piles of them. “The number of targets you can nominate through AI is just skyrocketing,” Vandier said.

To prioritize targets and develop a course of action, the Pentagon is increasingly using AI to run models and digital wargames. In one of many efforts, last year it contracted with Pittsburgh-based Strategy Robot to develop advanced systems that can churn through vast numbers of scenarios despite imperfect information. From potentially millions of iterations, planners can zoom in on actions that are more likely to achieve their objectives.

In the pre-AI world, after rough outlines were agreed on for an operation, commanders and specialists would develop mission plans, compiling paper-stuffed binders in a weekslong exercise. AI can potentially do the same work in days, military leaders say.

Planning any military assault—from the fast, targeted mission in January to seize Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro to the war with Iran—brings together subject-matter specialists including intelligence officers, combat commanders, weapons experts and logistics managers. Sessions can include around 40 people.

“The more people you add into planning, the longer it takes,” said a U.S. Army officer in Europe with experience in the process.

As preparations advance and plans evolve, each specialist revises their own plans, with knock-on effects for the others. If intelligence reports, for example, shift a bombing target to a more-distant objective, commanders may opt to use different aircraft or weapons, which in turn can affect crew rostering, flight planning and fuel consumption.

Until now, updating all those factors was slow and often subjective. Now AI can process complex interactions instantaneously, accounting for how each change ripples through military choreography.

Once a strike occurs, AI can speed assessments of battle damage, via image-processing software like tools helping with initial intelligence. While analysis is limited by the quality of imagery—which can depend on factors as basic as weather and whether a target is above ground—AI’s ability to merge varied inputs is changing the discipline. In a process known as sensor fusion, AI can digest visuals, radar, heat signatures and mass-spectroscopy to synthesize a list of possible conclusions. Fast analysis of where attacks succeeded or failed in turn helps refine lists of subsequent targets.

One thing AI can’t replace is human judgment. Many military officials involved in AI projects warn that the technology’s capabilities risk prompting an overreliance on information it provides—a trend linked with the phrase “The computer said to do this.”

Offloading decisions to AI “is a serious concern,” said Probasco at Georgetown, who held various posts in the Navy. She said that, as with other weapons systems, safeguards must be implemented to limit risks. “That infrastructure is underinvested in now,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal
By
Dominic Chopping
Follow
Updated Sept. 29, 2025 6:39 am ET

Jaguar Land Rover discovered a cyberattack late last month, forcing the company to shut down its computer systems and halt production.

Jaguar Land Rover will restart some sections of its manufacturing operations in the coming days, as it begins its recovery from a cyberattack that has crippled production for around a month.

“As the controlled, phased restart of our operations continues, we are taking further steps towards our recovery and the return to manufacture of our world‑class vehicles,” the company said in a statement Monday.

The news comes a day after the U.K. government stepped in to provide financial support for the company, underwriting a 1.5 billion-pound ($2.01 billion) loan guarantee in a bid to support the company’s cash reserves and help it pay suppliers.

The loan will be provided by a commercial bank and is backed by the government’s export credit agency. It will be paid back over five years.

“Jaguar Land Rover is an iconic British company which employs tens of thousands of people,” U.K. Treasury Chief Rachel Reeves said in a statement Sunday.

“Today we are protecting thousands of those jobs with up to 1.5 billion pounds in additional private finance, helping them support their supply chain and protect a vital part of the British car industry,” she added.

The U.K. automaker, owned by India’s Tata Motors, discovered a cyberattack late last month, forcing the company to shut down its computer systems and halt production.

The company behind Land Rover, Jaguar and Range Rover models, has been forced to repeatedly extend the production shutdown over the past few weeks as it races to restart systems safely with the help of cybersecurity experts flown in from around the globe, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and law enforcement.

Last week, the company began a gradual restart of its operations, bringing some IT systems back online. It has informed suppliers and retail partners that sections of its digital network is back up and running, and processing capacity for invoicing has been increased as it works to quickly clear the backlog of payments to suppliers.

JLR has U.K. plants in Solihull and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, in addition to Halewood in Merseyside. It is one of the U.K.’s largest exporters and a major employer, employing 34,000 directly in its U.K. operations. It also operates the largest supply chain in the U.K. automotive sector, much of it made up of small- and medium-sized enterprises, and employing around 120,000 people, according to the government.

Labor unions had warned that thousands of jobs in the JLR supply chain were at risk due to the disruption and had urged the government to step in with a furlough plan to support them.

U.K. trade union Unite, which represents thousands of workers employed at JLR and throughout its supply chain, said the government’s loan guarantee is an important first step.

“The money provided must now be used to ensure job guarantees and to also protect skills and pay in JLR and its supply chain,” Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said in a statement.

wsj.com By
Robert McMillan
Sept. 15, 2025 7:00 am ET

Botnets, massive networks of hacked devices, are being used for dangerous attacks, one of which recently set a world record

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently disrupted a network of hacked devices used by criminals in some of the largest online attacks yet seen. Now those devices have been hacked by someone new to build an even bigger weapon.
Law-enforcement agencies and technology companies are waging a war against increasingly powerful networks of hacked devices, called botnets, that can knock websites offline for a fee. They are used for extortion and by disreputable companies to knock rivals offline, federal prosecutors say.

But lately, a new age of dangerous botnets has arrived, and existing internet infrastructure isn’t prepared, some network operators say. These botnets are leveraging new types of internet-connected devices with faster processors and more network bandwidth, offering them immense power.

The criminals controlling the botnets now have the capabilities to move beyond website takedowns to target internet connectivity and disrupt very large swaths of the internet.

“Before the concern was websites; now the concern is countries,” said Craig Labovitz, head of technology with Nokia’s Deepfield division.

In August, federal prosecutors charged a 22-year-old Oregon man with operating a botnet that had shut down the X social-media site earlier this year.

But the FBI’s takedown last month appeared to have an unwanted consequence: freeing up as many as 95,000 devices to be taken over by new botnet overlords. That led to a free-for-all to take over the machines “as fast as possible,” said Damian Menscher, a Google engineer.

The operators of a rival botnet, called Aisuru, seized control of more than one-fourth of them and immediately started launching attacks that are “breaking records,” he said.

On Sept. 1, the network services company Cloudflare said it had measured an attack that clogged up computer networks with 11.5 trillion bits of junk information per second. That is enough to consume the download bandwidth of more than 50,000 consumer internet connections. In a post to X, Cloudflare declared this attack, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, a “world record” in terms of intensity. Some analysts see it almost as an advertisement of the botnet’s capabilities.

It was one of several dozen attacks of a similar size that network operators have witnessed over the past weeks. The attacks were very short in duration—often lasting just seconds—and may be demonstrations of the Aisuru capabilities, likely representing just a fraction of their total available bandwidth, according to Nokia.

With the world’s increasing dependence on computer networks, denial-of-service attacks have become weapons of war. Russia’s intelligence service, the GRU, used DDoS attacks on Ukraine’s financial-services industry as a way to cause disruption ahead of its 2022 invasion, U.K. authorities have said.

Botnets such as Aisuru are made up of a range of internet-connected devices—routers or security cameras, for example—rather than PCs, and often these machines can only join one botnet at a time. Their attacks can typically be fended off by the largest cloud-computing providers.

One massive network that Google disrupted earlier this year had mushroomed from at least 74,000 Android devices in 2023 to more than 10 million devices in two years. That made it the “largest known botnet of internet-connected TV devices,” according to a July Google court filing.

This network was being used to click billions of Google advertisements in an ad fraud scheme, Google said, but the massive network “could be used to commit more dangerous cybercrimes, such as ransomware” or denial-of-service attacks, the Google filing said.

To date, denial-of-service attacks are spawned from networks like Aisuru that typically include tens of thousands of computers, not millions, making them easier to defend against.

In the past year, a very large botnet that has typically been used for fraud began launching online attacks. Called ResHydra, it is made up of tens of millions of devices, according to Nokia.

Res Hydra represents a whole new level of problem, said Chris Formosa, a researcher with the networking company Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs. Harnessing a botnet of that size would “do extreme damage to a country.”