Military Tech Cooperation With Israel Is Less Radical Than Critics Claim

By Ashley Dowdney

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

For nearly 20 years, the United States’ military aid to Israel has come in the form of foreign military financing. A provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act would deepen the military ties between the two countries at a time when many Americans are increasingly skeptical of the relationship and some members of Congress would prefer to cut aid ties entirely.

 

Section 219 of the legislation, known as the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, would shift the U.S.-Israel relationship from that of donor and aid recipient to a more collaborative system designed to expand and accelerate defense technology development and manufacturing between the two countries. It would establish an executive agent, an office that reports to the secretary of defense or his deputy, to identify areas of collaboration in the defense technology sector. The office would establish frameworks for co-producing certain technologies and for manufacturing partnerships with Israeli companies, according to the text of the bill. Once technologies are developed, the office would also coordinate joint training exercises to make sure that each country’s military is ready and trained to use the technology.

 

The legislation comes at a time when the current basis for aid to Israel, a 2016 memorandum of understanding, is set to expire in 2028, and support for the country among congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans has weakened. At the same time, a 2025 Pew Research poll found that 53 percent of U.S. adults held an unfavorable view of Israel; by April of this year that number had climbed to 60 percent.

 

Supporters of the legislation believe that it will help the United States rebuild its defense industrial base, but critics of Section 219 have framed the provision as a “merger” of the U.S. military with Israel that would constitute a “betrayal of our sovereignty.” In June, Reps. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, tried unsuccessfully to introduce an amendment to strip the provision from the NDAA. Khanna said in an X post that the legislation would integrate the militaries of the United States and Israel. Tucker Carlson used similar rhetoric in a July podcast episode, claiming the provision would “merge” the militaries of the two countries; the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank that has been accused of antisemitism, used similar language in a June 2026 policy note. That’s a false representation of the legislation’s text, according to experts.

 

“This bill would be important, but still less impactful than either its U.S. supporters or critics claim. As with most everything else in American political debate nowadays, people will read into this bill whatever they want,” Jonathan Ruhe, the fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told The Dispatch.

 

The NDAA, which authorizes each fiscal year’s appropriations for the Defense Department and establishes defense policy, passed the House on July 22 and still needs Senate approval. Senators have less than two weeks in session before the start of the 2027 fiscal year, but it isn’t unusual for the NDAA to gain passage after the start of the fiscal year.

 

Drones and air defense.

 

Since 2007, the United States and Israel have operated under memoranda of understanding, the latest of which gives Israel $3.3 billion in security assistance and $500 billion in cooperative missile defense programs each year through 2028. Nearly all that money is used to purchase American-made technologies.

 

Section 219 would not replace the MOU but would provide for joint research, investment, development, and integration of defense technologies by the two countries. Though Israel attempted to push forward negotiations for a new MOU in July, it’s uncertain whether a new MOU can be agreed upon during the current Congress. If implemented, Section 219 “will allow U.S.-Israeli defense cooperation to move from the U.S. handing American dollars for them to buy American weapons to the United States and Israel funding together technological programs that are relevant to both,” Nitzan David Fuchs, a national security strategist and senior researcher at Israel’s Argaman Institute, said in an interview with Jerusalem News Syndicate.

 

Just as Ukraine has developed expertise in drone warfare and counter-drone technologies, Israel knows more than the United States about missile defense, applying artificial intelligence, and other capabilities, Bradley Bowman, director of the Center for Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Dispatch. That knowledge, coupled with Israel’s proven ability to quickly bring a tech concept to battlefield capability, could benefit the United States. The partnership increases “the sophistication and capacity of the American defense industrial base,” Bowman said. “It is allowing us to benefit from Israeli technology, and it is helping deliver weapons and capabilities more quickly to U.S. service members.”

 

Some analysts believe the relationship between the two countries must capitalize on Israel’s experiential knowledge of a rapidly changing defense sector. The existing MOU was written for “a world of fax machines and F-16s. The next one has to be written for a world of frontier AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing,” a report on the proposed alliance from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan organization studying the effects of emerging technologies on national security, noted. “Israel fills critical gaps with precision. … The result is a battle-tested ecosystem validated in adversarial conditions directly relevant to U.S. economic and national security priorities.”

 

“[Israelis] improve on so many of our defense capabilities because they’re always at the risk of an imminent war or in a war, and we just learn from each other,” Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, told The Dispatch.

 

Israel’s skill at turning technology concepts into battlefield capabilities has led more countries to turn to it for weapons, with the Israeli Defense Ministry reporting earlier this year that 2025 arms sales had increased 30 percent over the previous year.

 

“Israel is not an industrial superpower, but in some areas they are a technology superpower,” Bowman said. Israeli technologies like the Iron Beam, a directed-energy air defense system, are one example and could be an area for manufacturing collaboration with the United States, according to Ruhe. Countering drones with traditional air-defense systems is expensive and resource-intensive, but Iron Beam can theoretically eliminate an unlimited number of incoming drones, according to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the Israeli defense company behind the technology.

 

Section 219 is intended to facilitate faster development of such battlefield technologies. On average, the U.S. defense acquisition process takes 12 years to put a technology into the hands of a warfighter, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report. The report said such a time frame is “incompatible with meeting emerging threats” and often delivers “obsolete” programs.

 

“If [the United States] can’t go more quickly from concept requirement to field a combat capability, we are going to pay an even higher price for that, I fear, in a future conflict,” Bowman said.

 

Shifting political sentiment.

 

Some American lawmakers, mainly progressive Democrats and a few Republicans wary of the country’s close ties to Israel, are having second thoughts about continuing the relationship after the surge in anti-Israeli sentiment that followed Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. Almost half of all House Democrats voted to end the $3.3 billion in foreign military financing to Israel in July, though the amendment, introduced by Massie, failed.

 

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, who voted to cancel foreign military financing to Israel, initially saw Section 219 as a way for the United States to benefit from Israeli technology, but changed his mind because of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and military actions in the West Bank and Lebanon. “There’s no end to it. This was not the appropriate way to strengthen our relationship with Israel if they are unwilling to change anything,” Smith told The Dispatch.

 

On September 3, 56 civil rights and advocacy groups, among them Amnesty International USA and the Quincy Institute, sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services committees that urged them to strike Section 219 from the NDAA. The letter states that “Israel’s grievous violations of U.S. and international law” and use of American weapons to do so should prevent the expansion of military cooperation between the United States and Israel.

 

Meanwhile, leading critics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship have made unfounded claims about the nature of Section 219. On Carlson’s podcast, former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich claimed the move would “integrate the U.S. and Israeli military” and was “a direct attack on American independence, a direct attack on American sovereignty.” Yet the bill’s text contains no language about ceding decisions on military operations to Israel and addresses only cooperation in the defense technology sector.

 

While Carlson’s claim in an accompanying Substack post is correct that the provision, should it be passed into law, would provide some level of institutional integration between the two countries’ militaries and survive “administrations, elections, and shifting public opinion by design,” Congress could dismantle the initiative. Since 2021, the transfer of Israel from U.S. Europe Command to Central Command has “deepened operational collaboration” between the military forces of the two countries—a move that allows Israel and Arab countries to better collaborate and counter Iranian aggression, according to a JINSA report at the time.  

 

Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, wrote that the legislation would shelter the current U.S-Israel relationship “from regular congressional votes and oversight,” but the text of the bill calls for the executive agent to provide a yearly report on its activities and recommendations to Congress. Additional oversight of the executive agent would come from the defense secretary and the deputy defense secretary, who could overrule the executive agent’s decisions, and Congress, which would control appropriations for the office.

 

“Neither the U.S., nor Israeli governments, nor defense companies in either country, want to give one another the types of control that this bill’s critics say it does,” Ruhe told The Dispatch. “Israelis’ sensitivities about such issues are innately high, and have only risen higher amid tussles with Biden and Trump over arms resupplies, Gaza, Lebanon, and a potential nuclear deal with Iran.”

 

Moving away from aid.

 

Indeed, Israeli leaders themselves have led the turn away from the aid-based relationship. In a January interview with The Economist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “[Israel] wants to be as independent as possible” and that he wants to “taper off military aid within the next ten years.” The current aid-based relationship has “a very low chance of continuing under any future administration,” and that there must be “a new basis for the relationship that is a transition from aid to partnership,” former Israel Defense Forces military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told the Times of Israel in May.

 

Tensions in Israel’s relationship with the U.S. have also affected Israeli public opinion, largely because of how the war with Iran and continued fighting in Lebanon have played out. A June 2026 survey conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that only 12 percent of Israelis believe that President Donald Trump is highly committed to Israel’s security interests. The majority of the Israeli public believes that “when a gap exists between Israeli and American positions on political-security issues, Israel’s ability to act according to its own considerations is limited.” There is a widely held consensus in Israel supporting a shift away from American aid, Raphael BenLevi, a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security, told The Dispatch.

 

Dependence on the United States turns Israel’s war fighting “from a military matter to a political one,” wrote Eric Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network, in a January 2026 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. Mandel argued that Israel should phase out military aid and shift to joint ventures, since America does not necessarily view existential threats to Israel through the same lens as Israelis.

 

Not everyone in the pro-Israel camp agrees that shifting away from a solely aid-based relationship would help Israel, since it would necessitate bearing a larger share of the cost of defending itself. If Israel does not dramatically increase its defense budget to cover the elimination of foreign military financing, “there’ll be gaps in Israeli military capability that will make them less secure and will undermine American interests,” Bowman added. That’s because Israel helps the United States neutralize threats in the Middle East without Americans having to get involved.

 

Netanyahu wants to eliminate aid “for political reasons that are contrary to the interests of Israel,” Bowman told The Dispatch. Israeli defense industrial base independence “plays really well politically, particularly on the right, but it’s completely unrealistic, and it’s not going to happen anytime in our lifetime.”