Buried within the “must-pass” annual defense authorization bill now before the House is a provision, Section 224, that would order the Pentagon to merge key parts of the American and Israeli defense technology sectors, creating a deeper level of military-industrial integration, analysts say, than the United States maintains with any other country on Earth.
Though presented by Israel and its American lobby as a way to draw down U.S. support for Israel, the Quincy Institute, which first reported the measure, describes it as a vehicle to move from the expiring 10-year, $3.8-billion-a-year U.S. aid package to Israel to enduring military cooperation, nestled deep inside the Pentagon’s procurement system, which affords less transparency and accountability.
Section 224, the institute’s Ben Freeman wrote, would lay the groundwork for “bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of American-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.” The two countries already collaborate heavily on missile defense, he noted, but the provision would extend that coordination to nearly every frontier of defense technology, including AI, quantum technology, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, and biotech, as well as “network integration” and “data fusion.”
“In other words,” Freeman wrote, “the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”
The provision has already survived its first challenge. On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee took up an amendment by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) to strip Section 224 from the bill, and voted it down by voice vote. The committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) and others maintained that the section merely covers “existing initiatives” and “actually improves oversight and accountability of these programs by designating a single official responsible for them.” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the panel’s ranking Democrat, agreed. “It’s not a new framework at all,” he said. “We have three existing programs right now where we do military cooperation with Israel to develop technologies. Those programs already exist.”
Those remarks, while perhaps expected from Israel lobby-funded politicians, radically understate the degree to which Section 224 integrates American and Israeli weapons and technology production, in ways that should concern every American.
The text of Section 224 directs the Pentagon to identify “Israeli-origin technologies… for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record” (224(a)(1)) and to build “United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry” (224(a)(4)). A direct function of this bill would therefore be to place foreign-built parts into American weapons systems.
The presence of foreign components in U.S. systems inherently raises the risk of compromised integrity—a risk sharpened in this case by Israel’s demonstrated willingness and capability to weaponize supply chains, most vividly in the 2024 terror attack that involved the detonation of thousands of pagers that were turned into remote-controlled bombs.
Despite those risks, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does not set any conditions on the integrity of systems developed with Israel under Section 224’s partnerships. The omission would be less conspicuous had the same bill not, elsewhere, written exactly the expected safeguards for what the legislation calls the American “Defense Industrial Base.”
An entire subtitle of the NDAA, “Provisions to Protect and Strengthen Supply Chains,” outlines four. They include the authority to exclude untrusted vendors as “sources of concern” (Sec. 1802); a rule that sensitive parts be bought “exclusively from the original manufacturer or an authorized dealer” (Sec. 1803); restrictions on “purchases from certain countries” (Sec. 1804); and a program to “illuminate, assess, anticipate, and respond to risks” across the defense supply chain (Sec. 1805).
Yet those provisions to protect supply chains almost exclusively screen adversaries, not allies and other partners, and nowhere in the text are applied to Israel. Section 1802 defines an excludable “source of concern” as one controlled by or affiliated with the intelligence service of a “foreign adversary.” And while the U.S. intelligence community has assessed Israel to be one of the most aggressive intelligence services operating against the United States—a secret National Intelligence Estimate has ranked it third while NBC reported last Friday that the Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat assessment on Israeli spying operations against Americans to the highest level, “critical” —Washington does not officially designate Israel an adversary, leaving the Section 224 partnership exempt from the safeguards the bill constructs for other foreign-sourced parts.
Section 224’s lone gesture toward protecting the integrity of American systems and assets from Israel is a requirement that collaborative research be conducted “in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel.”
But it never says whether that means two separate sets of interests or one shared set, and elsewhere, in subsection (e)(2), the legislation calls them “shared national security interests,” treating the two countries’ security interests as one and the same, even though they very often diverge.
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Moreover, Section 224 is just one gift to Israel, adding to a broad array of other Israel-specific privileges renewed and expanded by this same NDAA bill. Those include a two-year extension of the war-reserve stockpile the United States maintains on Israeli soil (Sec. 1221), a broadened “subterranean” cooperation authority dealing with “tunnels, bunkers, and other underground targets” (Sec. 1222), and a counter-drone program (Sec. 1223). That is on top of an additional $300 million allocated for the Missile Defense Agency’s “Israeli Cooperative Programs” (line 096, photo below for reference).
As the NDAA makes its way through the House, where it is expected to be considered for a floor vote before the July recess, Americans should demand that their politicians distinguish between the national security interests of the United States and Israel, and that they place the former ahead of the latter.
