Katrina Manson
The Big Story
Mar 23, 2026 6:00 AM
Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence: Meet the Gods of AI Warfare
In its early days, the AI initiative known as Project Maven had its fair share of skeptics at the Pentagon. Today, many of them are true believers.

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The NGA officials walked me through Maven’s developments since the agency took over most of it two years before. Five of eight Maven initiatives, including analyzing drone feeds and satellite imagery, ended up with NGA. Whitworth wanted to expand the scope and capabilities of his agency in line with the expansion of ubiquitous global sensors. AI relied on data, and that required global surveillance to deliver it. While NSA could listen in to the world, NGA could watch it. Whitworth made clear he wanted to do that in minute, constant detail—surveilling the entire globe, at all times. NGA previously gave me a demonstration showing how AI could flag military construction in China—such as the arrival of a new rail depot at a missile base. NGA kept track of all movement at 49,000 airfields around the world. Whitworth even wanted to put GPS, or a similar navigation system, on the moon. And if GPS got jammed or hacked, he wanted other ways to map space too: NGA was fashioning digital maps drawing on magnetics, gravity, remote sensing, celestial navigation, and elevation. “From seabed to space,” went the new mantra he unveiled in 2023. The US war horse wanted omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.

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Maven was now coming closer to home as a prodigious border control and drug policing tool. (NGA can only use Maven domestically during a federally declared emergency, at the request of the lead federal agency. NGA has previously undertaken such a role in support of the National Guard in stemming wildfires, but not through NGA Maven, according to the NGA official.) Nevertheless, some thought the move was a quintessential example of imperial boomerang, the theory developed by 1950s intellectual Aimé Césaire that a colonial power using oppressive techniques overseas would eventually bring them home. The US could end up with a well-equipped military “optimized for domestic warfare,” argued one commentator worried by the deployment of hi-tech troops to US streets.

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When I visited NGA headquarters in June 2025, one of the four officials I met asserted that there were still humans in the loop. But General Donahue’s point about the direction of travel was well founded: The Defense Department’s policy on autonomy has nothing to say about having a human involved. It states only that “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” are required.

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Maven’s AI had already sped up the pace of war. An NGA official told me that with the help of Maven’s computer vision the US went from being able to hit under a hundred targets a day to being able to hit a thousand. Now, as LLMs were integrated into the Maven platform, the official told me processes were speeding up and that number had risen fivefold to 5,000 targets a day.

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