Late Monday night Tech Inquiry reported on an Assistant Director of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency disclosing the deployment of the Pentagon's A.I. drone targeting program, Project Maven, in Ukraine. The next day, a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone crashed into the Black Sea after coming in close contact with a Russian fighter jet.

Tech Inquiry reported on Project Maven's integration with the Lynx Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) of MQ-9 Reapers in September 2021 through a detailed analysis of public procurement records. As a result of 90 day disclosure delays, it became public today that one of the primary Project Maven contracts -- codenamed "Pavement + Cadillac" -- was increased by more than $9 million in December. (Tech Inquiry was the first to report the Project Maven contract codenames. And while a January 2022 report from the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Defense confirmed two of them, the IG denied Tech Inquiry's Freedom of Information request for the more detailed classified report based upon a December 18, 2018 determination exempting all "Project Maven infrastructure".)

Despite public narratives centering on Project Maven's usage of artificial intelligence to automate the analysis of drone surveillance footage for targeting, in 2021 Tech Inquiry reported that public disclosures of Project Maven's subcontracts revealed a broader focus including the analysis of satellite imagery, Synthetic Aperture Radar, social media, and 'Captured Enemy Materials' (CEM). The typical term-of-art for the fusion of such a broad range of surveillance capabilities is all-source intelligence. (Out of the three prime awards analyzed by Tech Inquiry, Microsoft was the largest recipient and was paid $31.6 million for work including the "automat[ing] and augmentat[ing] the analysis of [Wide Area Motion Imagery]" and "[Electro-optical] and [infrared] [Full Motion Video] [Machine Learning]".)

But the potential military escalation caused by Tuesday's crash of a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper, which a U.S. defense official said was over the Black Sea west of Crimea, brings fresh relevance to $1.95 million in Project Maven subcontracts paid to the embattled A.I. defense and intelligence contractor Rebellion Defense. Notably, a $600,000 subaward signed on January 4, 2021 was to "Improve MQ-9 Lynx Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery labeling quality through Rebellion Defense's SAR colorization methodology".

(Rebellion Defense was founded by former Director of the Defense Digital Service Chris Lynch with the backing of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, largely in the context of Google's backpedalling on Project Maven in 2018. But, as was reported by Tech Inquiry on Friday, new contract disclosures reveal that Google resumed selling A.I. for processing aerial imagery to the Pentagon.)

Rebellion's work on Project Maven, as well as its $633,600 subaward on a Special Operations Command contract also revealed by Tech Inquiry, were the subject of a Vox exposé in December. According to Vox, "[Rebellion's] experiment failed, and the Pentagon discontinued the contract, according to a former senior Pentagon official familiar with the contract."

But the usage of electromagnetic surveillance systems operating outside of the visual range was emphasized by the NGA as a key component of U.S. situational awareness in Ukraine last week. According to NGA Assistant Secretary for Capabilities Phillip C. Chudoba, the U.S. has "a heavy reliance on non-[electro-optical] imaging systems to see what's happening [in Ukraine]...Our reliance on some of the radar capabilities kind of has been driven home." And the founder of the NGA's open source intelligence project, Chris Rasmussen, went so far as to name Hawkeye 360 as an important provider of such technology.

Given the NGA's disclosure last week that Project Maven was deployed in Ukraine by a "military partner", and the existence of public contract notices detailing Project Maven's integration into the Synthetic Aperture Radar of MQ-9 Reapers, it is worth determining whether Project Maven inadvertently contributed to one of the most significant military escalations of our time.