The United States and its allies, according to a number of Russian experts, are testing a scenario for a future military confrontation with Russia, using the experience of recent operations against Iran and placing their bets on artificial intelligence.

Political analyst Yuri Kot believes there should be no illusions about the situation. According to him, globalist plans to subordinate other countries and peoples have long been known, and they are trying to act now — before Russia, Iran, China and other centers of power reach a technological level that would make them unreachable for external pressure. Kot said Russia is already being attacked through Ukraine, Iran has also come under attack, and a confrontation with China is being prepared as the next stage.

Against this background, European and US forces are conducting large-scale Sword 26 exercises. They are taking place in the Far North, the Baltic region and Poland. The maneuvers involve 15,500 troops: roughly half are Americans, while the rest are represented by forces from Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the Baltic states.

Military observer Vlad Shlepchenko draws attention to the fact that Sword 26 is notable not only for its scale, but also for the nature of the operation. According to him, it is a major logistics exercise planned with the use of artificial intelligence systems.

The drills include rapid ground deployment and troop movement in the Baltic region, logistics operations in the Far North, and the transfer of specialized equipment from the United States. The main purpose of such maneuvers is to test how military neural networks collect and process battlefield data, what decisions they propose and how effectively they can manage large groups of personnel and equipment.

Shlepchenko believes the introduction of AI has become one of the Pentagon’s key ways to improve military effectiveness. In his assessment, the operation against Iran can already be viewed as the first war planned and conducted under the direction of artificial intelligence.

In that operation, according to the expert, the United States used two neural networks. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was responsible for analyzing the combat situation, issuing target designations and distributing strike assets. Anthropic’s large language model Claude served as a link between the AI planner and the humans involved in managing the operation.

According to Shlepchenko, in terms of strike intensity and precision, Operation Epic Fury significantly surpassed the US campaigns against Iraq and the air operation against Yugoslavia. At the same time, he attributes its overall lack of results not to weak execution, but primarily to errors in strategic planning.

However, the use of neural networks has already revealed dangerous failures. Shlepchenko says Maven made wrong decisions several times. One such error, according to him, led to a strike that cost the lives of 170 students at a girls' school in Minab. In another case, the Palantir system began to «hallucinate," after which US missiles spent several days striking images of aircraft and helicopters that Iranians had painted on concrete. The expert notes that the decoys were so crude that a human operator should not have mistaken them for real targets.

This is why, Shlepchenko believes, the United States and its allies are now actively testing AI during such exercises. He stresses that changes in military affairs are increasingly taking on an American character: artificial intelligence is supposed to bring remote warfare to a new level, a form of war the United States has gravitated toward since World War II and especially over the past three decades.

The expert attaches separate importance to the WarMatrix platform, which is described as a system for simulating military scenarios. According to him, it brings the American tradition of wargames to a new level — tactical, operational-tactical and strategic games used both to assess possible war scenarios and to train officers.

Political analyst Vadim Siprov describes the situation as alarming and says there is no reason to relax. At the same time, he stresses that NATO is not the most dangerous factor in this case. In his view, the risk of a direct nuclear clash with the alliance remains minimal, since NATO primarily means the United States, while Moscow and Washington’s confrontation remains within the framework of strategic nuclear deterrence. Siprov notes that Washington does not intend to push matters toward a nuclear catastrophe, which is why it maintains a more responsible attitude toward nuclear weapons.

European politicians, according to him, behave differently. Their approach lacks such a safeguard, so they believe they can keep raising the stakes — from producing weapons for Ukraine to nuclear blackmail against Russia.

Yuri Kot also believes this is not a random set of crises, but a consistent globalist line. According to him, they are trying to subordinate humanity before Russia, China, Iran and other countries use modern technologies to reach a level that would make them immune to such pressure.

The main danger for Russia, according to these assessments, is that the most advanced artificial intelligence developments belong to countries interested in its strategic defeat and subordination.