Israel approves fourth F-35I and second F-15IA squadrons in opening tranche of $119bn force buildup

What was approved

On 3 May 2026 Israel’s Ministerial Committee on Procurement (MOCP) cleared the simultaneous purchase of a fourth F-35I Adir squadron from Lockheed Martin and a second F-15IA squadron from Boeing. The Israeli Ministry of Defense confirmed the decision over the weekend, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz framing it as the opening move of the wider “Magen Israel” force buildup — a 350-billion-shekel (US$119bn) decade-long plan first authorised in late 2025. [1] [2]

Reuters and the Israeli MoD value the combined package at at least US$6bn, inclusive of fleet integration, sustainment, spare parts and logistics. [3] The director-general of the Defense Ministry has now instructed the Israeli procurement delegation in Washington to move to signature with the US Government and the prime contractors.

Once delivered the order takes the IAF inventory to a target of ~100 F-35I and 50 F-15IA, anchoring an explicit high-low mix that the Iran conflict (Operation Roaring Lion, the 40-day campaign of summer 2025) is widely held to have validated. The new F-35I squadrons are expected to be based at Nevatim Air Base alongside the existing 116th “Lions of the South” (Arayot HaDarom) and 140th “Golden Eagle” (Nesher HaZahav) squadrons. [4]

The high-low doctrine, restated

Israeli air-power planners describe the two airframes as a complementary pair: the F-35I as the scalpel and the F-15IA as the hammer. The vocabulary is deliberate and the division of labour is operational, not rhetorical.

The point of the pairing is not that one airframe replaces another; it is that each airframe occupies the role for which it is most efficient. The F-35I goes first into contested airspace, generating a real-time picture and prosecuting the highest-risk targets from inside an integrated air-defence bubble. The F-15IA, surging from outside the threat ring, then arrives with overwhelming ordnance against fixed and emerging targets the F-35I has already characterised. In the Iran war, this is broadly the pattern Western analysts assess Israel ran — and it is the pattern the new squadrons are designed to industrialise.

What actually binds them: the C4ISR fabric

The interesting part of this procurement is not either airframe in isolation. It is the connective tissue.

Israel runs a sovereign command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) overlay that sits on top of the US baseline and, in places, replaces it. The major elements include:

• Elbit Systems Torch-X — the battle-management backbone, fielded across the IAF and IDF ground forces.
• IAI special-mission aircraft — the Shavit (signals intelligence), Eitam (Conformal Airborne Early Warning & Control on Gulfstream G550) and Oron (multi-mission ISR on G550) platforms generate the wide-area picture that fighters plug into.
• Israeli “app-style” mission overlay on the F-35I — bolt-on Israeli command software that runs alongside the Lockheed Martin baseline, reportedly with the agility of the Joint Strike Fighter Programme’s Block 4 / TR-3 stack.
• AI-assisted targeting — including the Habsora (“Gospel”) target-recommendation system that compresses the find-fix-finish loop.
• Custom Israeli secure datalinks — running in parallel with Link 16 / MADL where required, and deliberately structured so Israel does not depend on the US Joint Programme Office for combat-critical software updates.

In operational terms: the F-35I penetrates and senses; the C4ISR layer fuses and prioritises; the F-15IA delivers the mass. None of this is implied by the airframe specification sheets. All of it is what the Israeli MoD is actually buying when it buys an F-35I or an F-15IA.

What is in the box: 2026 configuration upgrades

Both airframes are being delivered in their most current configuration, with continuing Israeli modifications driven by combat feedback — not as new designs, but as the current evolution of mature products.

The combat feedback loop in the other direction matters too. Israeli operational experience in Iran — how the AN/APG-81 actually performed against modern Russian-pattern emitters, where Block 4 software stumbled, what proved fragile in the EW kit — is being fed back to Lockheed Martin and the US Air Force. That information is one of the reasons Washington keeps signing off on Israeli F-35 sales: Israel is the most operationally stressed F-35 customer in the fleet, and it pays for the data with combat sorties no other partner is flying.

F-15IA versus F-15EX: where the deltas are

The F-15IA is best understood as the F-15EX Eagle II airframe with a heavy Israeli overlay. The flight-performance envelope — speed, payload, range, radar — is essentially identical. The deltas are in the systems that decide whether an airframe survives and prosecutes targets in a contested electromagnetic environment.

The procurement consequence is straightforward: Israel is buying as much sovereign control over the upgrade path as the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) framework permits. Where the EPAWSS update cycle is held by the US Air Force, the Elbit suite update cycle is held in Israel. That distinction is doctrinal rather than commercial — it is what allows Israel to retune its EW posture inside an active campaign, on weeks rather than years.

Delivery profile and squadron status

The shape of the delivery curve, on current public information:

Squadron names and numbers for the new third and fourth F-35I squadrons and the second F-15IA squadron have not been publicly released. The IAF generally announces squadron identity and insignia closer to activation. The two existing F-35I squadrons remain a useful reference for what to expect: the 116th “Lions of the South” and the 140th “Golden Eagle” both ship recognisable insignia — the 140th’s 2016-vintage modernised eagle, in particular, was redesigned to align visually with the F-35I airframe and became a prominent unit identity.

The name Adir itself (אדיר, “Mighty One”) is one of the biblical names of God in Judaism. It is not a casual choice and reflects the political weight Israel attaches to the platform.

Industrial signal

For the US prime contractors, the MOCP approval is a meaningful read on the late-2020s order book. Three points stand out:

• Lockheed Martin picks up a fourth Israeli F-35 squadron at a moment when the US Joint Programme Office is still working through Block 4 / TR-3 software-deployment frictions. The Israeli order is a vote of confidence that those frictions are tractable.
• Boeing doubles the F-15IA backlog at the moment the F-15EX line transitions from Tranche 1 to Tranche 2. A second IAF squadron is the kind of foreign anchor order that helps stabilise the St. Louis assembly cadence into the 2030s.
• The Israeli industrial supply chain — Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael Advanced Defense Systems — benefits twice. First as the integrator of the sovereign overlay on each delivered airframe; second as the Israeli party in offset and co-production arrangements that always accompany an FMS package of this scale.

What is conspicuously not in this announcement is a new weapon. No new air-launched munition has been disclosed alongside the order. That is consistent with the Israeli pattern: Israel is buying more of the airframe and more of the integration depth, then layering existing Python-5 / SPICE / Delilah / Rampage-class effectors against the C4ISR fabric. Industrial implication: expect follow-on Israeli munitions orders — through Rafael in particular — rather than a new line item from a US prime.

Data gaps

Open-source information on the following remains thin and should be treated with caution:

• Final unit cost per airframe, on either order line. The headline US$6bn figure is package-level and includes sustainment.
• Specific Block 4 software thresholds the new airframes will be delivered against. The Pentagon’s Block 4 plan was rebaselined in late 2025; the Israeli order will inherit whatever the US JPO has cleared by the relevant delivery slot.
• Whether the second F-15IA squadron will share a base with the first or stand up as a separate operational unit. Public reporting has not addressed basing.
• Whether the order interlocks with any forthcoming US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) reauthorisation. The headline figures suggest a heavy FMF component but the specific instrument has not been published.