On the first day of the war on Iran, February 28, Palantir’s Maven Smart System steered the U.S. military to strike at more than 1,000 targets. One was a primary school in Minab, where more than 160 people were killed, most of them children. Al Jazeera examined that strike this week under the question of whether AI systems can make moral decisions in war.

Oof. No. The question the article debates is undecidable, and therefore a useless distraction. The question it should be asking instead has an answer from 1931.

Note, for example, how the article quotes the CENTCOM commander on the safeguard:

Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.

The claim that the decision stays human fails scrutiny. Operator fatigue is the obvious counter point. A flood of rapid decisions leads to inability to assess the choices. When the time to decide shrinks to seconds, repeatedly, the decisions stop being human. The claim from CENTCOM, about itself, fails to hold ground when evaluated from outside.

Kurt Gödel in 1931 famously confronted exactly this form of claim. His paper constructed, inside a formal system, a sentence about that system’s own capacity to prove things:

We are therefore confronted with a proposition which asserts its own unprovability.

(Kurt Gödel, Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, 1931)

Proposition XI followed. A consistent system rich enough for arithmetic places its own consistency beyond its own proof. Verification requires a reader standing outside the system. Every statement the system makes about its own soundness, however elaborate, carries the same evidential weight from inside: zero.

The two loops that military and industrial doctrine run on were built before this became an engineering problem. In an OODA loop, the pilot reports on an adversary the report describes from outside. In the PDCA, a Check worked because others stood in the room with the operators to challenge the operator’s account of their own work.

Maven refuses outside evaluation. The pipeline runs find, fix, track, target, engage, assess as a single chain. The system that generates the target assesses the strike. The legal sign-offs travel inside the pipeline. Civilian harm review now runs on a tool built on Maven itself, cut to nine staff from 40. Every phase of the loop reports on itself, and Gödel proved the limited utility of this ninety-five years ago.

The MOCA loop, Gebrüder Ottenheimer Brief №7, is built to investigate what Gödel identified. Verification of AI lives outside the chain that proposed the action. Here are the four phases against Maven:

Al Jazeera should not ask whether Maven can carry moral weight, given the logic. Gödel points at a smaller and harder question: who outside CENTCOM can replay the Minab targeting chain and detect tampering?

Four months of a stalled Pentagon investigation were avoidable. An outside log, with outside analysis, would have exposed the record in February.

Here’s something to consider. A person terrified about their own safety aspires to amass power and wealth. Why? Because they are terrified about their own safety. So they hoard, and the hoard grows without limit, because it exists to offset a fear of losing control or status.

And so they enter the AI market and tell everyone they are terrified about their own safety because of… AI.

Sure, sure, we believe it is AI that puts the executive in danger. We also believed it was the cans when Steve Martin, standing in front of the cans in 1979, yelled “He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!”

To put it another way, here’s the kind of reporting I run into.

Earlier this year, the AI industry was shaken when a 20-year-old anti-AI activist named Daniel Moreno-Gama, armed with a gun and a Molotov cocktail, unsuccessfully tried to firebomb the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. No one was injured…

Anti-AI activist. Or anti-can activist?

One man, armed with one gun and one bottle of alcohol, shook the industry.

Hold on, let me check the other headline for a minute.

Heat that hit Europe exceptionally early and hard this year appears to have led to a spike in deaths, with well over 10,000 more people dying at the height of the heat wave than would normally have been expected…

Well, suddenly, unexpectedly, over 10,000 people dead? Yeah, so, is anyone stirred by that? Anyway back to the shaken AI industry, because someone could get hurt or even die.

Years ago, when I was working with Yahoo executives, I couldn’t help but notice that Marissa Mayer came in as CEO with constant body guards. Was there a threat? She didn’t get body guards for other staff, because it seemed to be a perception that the threat was attached to only top success. In fact, she built a daycare for her child, and hers alone, in the Yahoo campus, and then told every employee they need to be on campus like her, all the time, while their children stay home. Always available onsite daycare, bodyguards, for her while others faced the world without them.

I guess my question is, instead of calling the people around an AI CEO their bodyguards and accept their framing, why don’t we call their entourage FUD-care.

One time I was invited to a closed invite only party in San Francisco, with bouncers and security at the door. Once inside I crossed paths with Marissa Mayer and her two, yes two, bodyguards. Inside the perimeter. The musician performing on stage next to us was infinitely more famous, more wealthy, and yet had no personal security.

I’m sure if Marissa Mayer were CEO of OpenAI she would blame the industry that she is in, her role at the top of it, for what makes her so fearful for her safety. She would sound like Sam Altman. Or Elon Musk. The opposite of Craig Newmark. We should be asking whether some people wear their FUD as a badge, hype it up to get the attention, and see the world as an “othering” game. Credible threat intelligence never seems to be part of their story. Because if it were, they would probably be working on, or at least openly talking about, their role in the death of those 10,000 people in June 2026.

The message set is identical, not merely similar, all around the world. Russian intelligence officers are embedded in countries, hammering one disinformation line:

Democracy has failed, voting changes nothing, your problems are caused by outsiders and elites, only a strongman restores order.

It’s all bullshit. That script ran through Doppelgänger and Storm-1516 against Germany and through the same channels in the US. Watching the Sahel version of it now is helpful because it is further along the sequence. Africa shows us what the operation looks like after Russian full-capture succeeds: the security providers kill more civilians than the threat they were installed to solve, and information operations stop being a tool of acquisition and become an extraction scheme.

In Mali and Burkina Faso, violence against civilians by the militaries (and their Russian partners) since 2023 has resulted in more civilian fatalities than those caused by the jihadists.

Despite this collapsing house of cards, Russia and its junta allies remain on the offensive with their most potent asymmetric tool: information operations. Audaciously, this is not just directed at shoring up domestic support for the Sahelian juntas but is also targeting neighboring democratically oriented governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin. Social media accounts linked to Russia and the juntas extol the fictional development and stability realized under the military regimes. Any jihadist gains are blamed on Western collusion.

[…]

West Africa, thus, is in the throes of a pivotal race. Will the relentless negative messaging topple another democratic-leaning government before the fallacy of junta success is exposed? Or will the Sahelian military regimes collapse first, shattering any such illusion?

Russia is a shrinking economy with little to offer other states beyond aging, poorly designed weapons and grievance. Yet its legacy Cold War intelligence network makes it the dominant external actor in the Sahel and much of Africa despite providing 1 percent of the continent’s foreign direct investment, limited security assistance, and a political model few societies admit they would ever emulate. Influence is only made possible by their real product being disinformation, a narrative rather than anything material.

And now for some differences. The vehicle in Africa is still the coup. Russia has been caught in the Sahel, and their pivots to Nigeria and other West African states show they may be losing faith in their own disinformation. In Washington it could be argued whether it is a coup or not, while the public perception is still an electoral vehicle. In Berlin the AfD and BSW look more and more like instruments of Moscow than domestic parties. And the CSU’s Dobrindt keeps showing up to announce Moscow’s latest disinformation operations, a counter-messaging role that shows how deep the intelligence penetration runs.