27 Years Later, Still Bombing the Wrong Targets

Uncanny parallels between the elementary school in Iran and the Chinese embassy in Serbia

As the US-Israeli attack commenced on the morning of February 28, 2026, which was a school day in Iran, some parents in the town of Minab near Bandar Abbas were alerted to rush to their childrens’ school. Some of them arrived in time to see munitions hit the school—or just before. 175 people were killed in the strike, most of them young girls. The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed on March 11, via US officials and other sources, that US Tomahawk missiles struck the target by mistake. It is the strategic disaster of the war in a tactical microcosm.

Déjà vu

When I first saw the satellite images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the Times’ reporting on March 5, 2026, I had a sickening feeling. I knew that I was looking at an intelligence error rather than an operational mistake. The point of impact was just too precise, right in the middle of a building. The school building was right next to a larger IRGC naval base, which also had buildings with very similar damage. Someone, somewhere, had assessed that it was all one facility, somehow designating the girls’ school as part of an IRGC compound. This was not an errant bomb but a targeted strike.

I assumed at the time that the US was probably responsible. Early reporting stated that Israel focused on leadership targets while the US focused on military and naval targets. The US Navy would have had a special interest in taking out IRGC Navy targets. I quickly discarded (President Trump’s) idea that Iran bombed its own base, given the timing and precision of the multiple strikes, or that the school was knowingly hit as a school. Given the highly bureaucratized targeting processes in the US military, with multiple levels of review and many lawyers lurking around, conspiratorial perfidy or nefarious hacking seemed exceedingly remote. But for the same reasons, an intelligence failure seemed all too possible.

I thought so because I had seen something like this before. Almost three decades ago, I served as an intelligence officer during Operation Allied Force, the Kosovo Air War of 1999. During that war, the US military accidentally blew up the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. A mistake of that magnitude seemed unimaginable at the time. How could we possibly not know what we were hitting, and then hit that of all things? Anyone who walked by the street in Belgrade would plainly see it was an embassy, but US analysts only looked at overhead satellite imagery. The Chinese had told their counterparts in the US Department of State that they had relocated to that new building a year before, but that info had not been input into the military database. On the Master Air Attack Plan that fateful night in May, therefore, it was just “Belgrade Warehouse 1,” misidentified as the Yugoslav arms bureau, which was actually a few hundred yards away.

An investigative report, again in the New York Times, carried an image of the PowerPoint slide of the target that turned out to be the Chinese embassy (above). Simplified representations can take on a life of their own, projecting an air of authority that their flawed construction does not warrant. This particular target was reviewed and validated several times by several agencies. The slide was even briefed to President Bill Clinton (and the review of targets scheduled to go to the promiscuous president—draw your own parallels—was affectionately known as “the POTUS crank”). But the CIA’s fatal mistake was inadvertently repackaged and repeated as circular reporting, so all that multisource validation was actually invalid. Yet the operational targeteers did a bang-up job in weaponeering the building, and the aircrew delivered their bombs precisely to their designated mean points of impact (DMPIs). It turns out that everything on the slide was correct, except for the “linkage” which was dreadfully wrong. Even the casualty estimate was surprisingly accurate, as three Xinhua reporters were killed and at least twenty people were wounded.

I wrote about this incident in the introduction of my first book, which is about technology and knowledge in war. (I wasn’t allowed to put this slide in the book because of its “secret” marking, even though it was printed on the front page of the New York Times, so I am glad to finally post it here.) In many ways, this terrible mistake inspired me to go to grad school in political science, to understand how and why organizational perception could go so wrong, despite, if not because of, all the great intelligence and technology available to the US government.

The short answer is that maintaining the proper relationship between simplified targeting representations and a distant battlefield reality depends on a complicated dance of coordination that tends to hide its enabling work. Uncoordinated organizations tightly coupled to the strategic environment become epistemically brittle. Spectacular targeting errors are a kind of normal accident.

So, after hearing about the elementary school in Iran, I went back to this account in my book. I found this grim passage: “But mistakes were made….After each blunder, NATO staff officers reviewed and adapted their processes to avoid making the same mistakes. Then they made new ones.” Indeed, 27 years later, despite all the improvements in targeting processes across all the targeting mishaps in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere, “They made new ones.”

Apparently the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school was indeed on a U.S. target list, but it was misidentified as a valid military target. The earlier New York Times story on the Chinese embassy had described “an immense error, perfectly packaged,” amid “a chaotic scramble to meet the demand” by General Wesley Clark to find “two thousand targets,” a goal personnel described as “T2K.”

Sound familiar? In Iran, the US military was also scrambling to bomb a thousand targets on the first day of the war (T1K?), on a schedule that was apparently accelerated by political machinations between Washington and Jerusalem and the intelligence trigger on the elder Ayatollah Khamenei. Pentagon briefings meanwhile have been unusually focused on tallying numbers of strikes (T6K by now?), while at the same time mocking the rules of engagement that are meant to protect civilians.

Here is a plausible story

There has been speculation that AI might be to blame, but I am dubious. Maybe Maven and Claude helped make the rush to a thousand targets possible, and maybe Palantir pulled some recommendations from a database of validated targets for targeteers to consider. But I do not think AI is to blame for this particular mistake, or the validation of the target in the first place. It is much more likely that the US military fucked up the old-fashioned way.

The school was apparently part of the IRGC navy compound before 2013, i.e., a legitimate military target. I assume that the entire facility had been given a BE (Basic Encyclopedia) number and appeared in the MIDB (Modernized Intelligence Database) of targets worldwide. This target, along with some DMPIs, including a DMPI on the not-yet-a-school building, was probably added to the counter-naval annex in some contingency plan (CONPLAN) for war with Iran. This plan was probably sitting on the shelf for years, regularly reviewed and updated in routine theater targeting conferences and again with every geopolitical crisis with Iran (so many crises).

But then the Iranians created a school sometime by 2016. I don’t know why they put a school next to the base. Maybe it was cheap real estate. Maybe it started off as a navy school. Maybe the IRGC cynically thought that a school would provide some protection from law-abiding invaders, in which case their faith in US intelligence was woefully misplaced. But even if that were the case, it would be no excuse not to notice that it was a school. The schoolhouse had an adjacent playground, and new walls were added to separate it from the base, and a military watchtower was removed. With its pink walls and artwork, it would have been obvious to anyone walking by that it was a school (much as the Chinese embassy would have been obvious from the ground).

But US intelligence analysts squinting at black-and-white electro-optical satellite imagery obviously missed the signs. I assume that this target went through a few rounds of routine review at DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) or NGIA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency), or maybe some reserve unit tasked with going through the massive backlog of targets. The reviewing analyst did not notice anything unusual, because they weren’t looking for it. Once you’ve been looking at hundreds of targets, it takes a lot of discipline to keep seeing new targets, or new images of old targets, with fresh eyes. The existing assessment in the database has a certain inertia, so it is easier just to leave it unchanged rather than make a fuss about changing things. Thus the target was validated, probably several times in several routine reviews, and again during the reviews of the actual campaign plan.

I imagine that there is a PowerPoint slide for this target, no doubt with much better graphics than its 1999 predecessor. This slide will have a DMPI on the elementary school that is not labeled as an elementary school, but rather as just one of several buildings in the target facility. The slide will have been briefed, probably several times, along with hundreds of other slides, to various audiences of intelligence analysts, staff officers, operational commanders, and even JAGs (lawyers), all of whom were tired, hurried, stressed, and maybe also a little bit excited about the impending adventure.

The target and its DMPIs were then approved and forwarded on to the targeteers at the maritime component commander, who loaded up the coordinates in their mission planning system and beamed the data off to an Arleigh Burke destroyer in the Gulf. I am just speculating, of course, but something like this likely happened. When the multidomain fireworks began, the ships received their orders to launch their Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs)—a weapon that is now over forty years old and was used in the First Gulf War (the shock of the old!).

The ship’s commander and crew, who did everything right within the scope of their mission, probably had no idea where their missiles were going after they threw the firing switch. I’ve always found it strange that modern naval headquarters can have far better situational awareness than the ships actually doing the shooting. The crew and the entire US military establishment only found out about the mistake the same way that the rest of us did.

Atrocity by accident

When the first media reports trickled in over the weekend, the idea of hitting a girls’ school seemed so outrageous that it had to be propaganda, the kind of thing that authoritarians always say. But then the images of grieving mothers and rows of tiny graves began to appear. President Trump tried to pin it on Iran, even suggesting they used a TLAM which they do not have and could not deliver, while Secretary Hegseth moved quickly back to his puerile gloating about lethality and vengeance. The unseriousness of the leadership and the seriousness of this disaster is a study in contrast.

At least the US military appears to still have enough professionalism to investigate this tragedy. I hope the investigation is unbiased and thorough, so that we can learn what actually happened. While I expect that organizational routine will be a big part of the story, this is far from just a routine mistake. It would be martial malpractice to just shrug and mumble, well, fog of war, you know, shit happens. I would very much like to see someone take responsibility, let alone be held accountable, but I am not holding my breath.

The shambolic disaster of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school will stand out forever against all the operational prowess of Epic Fury, much as Abu Ghraib overshadows over the shock and awe of Iraqi Freedom, and the Chinese embassy looms over the airpower victory of Allied Force. I would be remiss not to also mention the shootdown of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988, during a previous militarized clash between the US and Iran, which killed 290 innocent civilians. (US presidents apologized for three of the four tragedies above; I’ll let you guess which of these things is not like the others.)

Horrific wartime targeting mistakes may be normal accidents, but we should never normalize them. The decision to go to war is a decision to roll the dice on awful outcomes that are both unimaginable in their specificity and perfectly predictable in their generality. This time, the price of a string of compounding mistakes is measured in a hundred tiny lives that had only just begun. And as long as there will be war, there will be a next time.