Illustrative image. A Belgian Air Force service member inspects the open weapons bay of an F-35A Lightning II at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, on 12 August 2026. This is not an Israeli F-35I and no SPICE weapon is shown. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Tekorey Watkins, 56th Fighter Wing, VIRIN 260812-F-QT044-1007, released via the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. U.S. Government work, public domain. Use does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of Defense.

An Israeli Weapon, an American Laboratory: What SPICE 1000 on the F-35I Actually Involves

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems announced on 15 September 2026 that its SPICE 1000 air-to-surface munition is being integrated on the Israeli Air Force F-35I Adir in a joint project with Lockheed Martin, carried out at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States. Rafael gives a range of more than 120 km and an electro-optical seeker using scene matching.

Technical Summary

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems used the Air and Space Forces Association (AFA) 2026 conference on 15 September 2026 to announce that SPICE 1000 (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) is being integrated on the F-35I Adir, the Israeli Air Force derivative of the F-35A. It is the first integration of the SPICE family on any F-35. Rafael describes a 1,000 lb-class weapon for fixed and high-value targets at more than 120 km, homing with an electro-optical seeker and scene-matching algorithms, sold to several countries and used for years from Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft, including in recent long-range operations. Israel Hayom, reporting the same announcement, identifies those operations as strikes on Iran and says completion is expected within months.

That is the update. The sentence that carries the most weight is the last one in Rafael’s text: the work is a joint Rafael and Lockheed Martin project, done at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States. What follows sets out why an Israeli weapon going onto an Israeli aircraft is being integrated in America, what the contract record shows about that work, where SPICE 1000 sits among the other non-United States weapons on the F-35, and what the announcement leaves unsaid.

The integration on the F-35 is being carried out as a joint project between Rafael and Lockheed Martin, at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, AFA 2026 announcement, 15 September 2026

What Rafael Said, and What It Did Not

What Rafael’s Own Datasheet Adds

Rafael’s SPICE 1000 and 2000 datasheet settles the range question and adds detail the announcement omits. The 60 km figure for the larger weapon is the useful contrast: on the datasheet’s own drawing the deployable wing set is drawn on SPICE 1000, and the wing set is the most visible difference between two kits whose reach differs by more than a factor of two. The datasheet does not itself attribute the difference to the wings. Two cautions apply. The datasheet does not mention the F-35, and its issue code (0324) suggests a March 2024 issue even though the copy ISC reviewed was generated in September 2026, so ISC uses it for design figures and not for integration or in-service status. It also gives no mass, dimensions, seeker waveband, specific bomb body, release envelope or datalink, and ISC does not infer them. It is also precise about where GPS independence applies: the weapon flies the midcourse on “its navigation system” and begins scene-matching acquisition as it approaches the target, so the GPS-independent claim is made for acquisition and homing rather than for the whole flight.

Why the Work Is Being Done in the United States

The F-35 is not an aircraft a customer can modify in its own hangar. Every operator flies the same mission-systems software baseline, maintained by Lockheed Martin under the F-35 Joint Program Office, and a new store is a change to that baseline: interface definitions, carriage and release logic, separation clearance and the software load that ties them together. Israel is the one operator that negotiated a measure of national customisation for its jets, and even that customisation is contracted back to the prime. That is the practical meaning of Rafael’s sentence. The weapon is Israeli and the customer is Israeli, but the aircraft software it must be written into is American, and so is the laboratory.

The contract record shows the channel. Israel funds its F-35I work through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) modifications to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics under a line called Israel System Development and Design Phase II, administered by Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland. Two recent awards set out its shape.

Neither award names SPICE, and ISC does not claim that either one funds it. What they establish is narrower and still useful: Israeli-specific F-35I software work is contracted to Lockheed Martin, performed mainly at Fort Worth, with a fifth of the effort outside the continental United States, most plausibly in Israel. A weapon integration running “at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States” fits that pattern exactly. Rafael does not name Fort Worth, however, and weapons integration is not a single-site activity. F-35 store work has also involved ground and flight test at United States test centres; the Meteor ground vibration and fit checks, for example, were run at Edwards Air Force Base. Fort Worth is therefore the likeliest home of the software work, and an inference rather than a sourced fact.

The joint-project language has its own history. Lockheed Martin and Rafael signed a memorandum of understanding on SPICE in July 2018, a teaming agreement in May 2019 covering development, marketing, manufacture and support of SPICE 1000 and SPICE 2000 guidance kits for United States sale, and an expanded agreement in November 2021 bringing in SPICE 250. The 2019 announcement recorded that more than 60 per cent of SPICE components were already made across eight United States states. The F-35I work is the first time that partnership has touched Lockheed Martin’s own fighter, seven years after it was formed.

The United States programme record carries the same item under a slightly different name. Reporting on the fiscal year 2027 F-35 Modernized Selected Acquisition Report, effective 21 April 2026 and cleared for release on 3 August 2026, lists SPICE 1000B among three F-35I upgrade items, alongside extended-range fuel tanks and an electronic warfare pod. It describes the weapon as moving through an accelerated process called SPICE Lite and gives no fielding date. Whether SPICE 1000B and Rafael’s SPICE 1000 are the same configuration is not stated in either source.

Doing the work inside the enterprise has a consequence beyond Israel. A store model, separation clearance and interface definition written into the common baseline is, in engineering terms, reusable by other F-35 operators, which is the basis for Israel Hayom’s observation that the integration could open the way to other F-35 customers. Whether it does is a release decision rather than an engineering one. It would turn on Israeli export approval for the weapon, United States handling of the integration data generated in American facilities, and the programme’s own policy on sharing partner-funded capability. None of those positions is on the public record.

The Earlier American Link, on Video

The American end of the SPICE supply chain was on the public record well before this week. On 31 October 2023 the United States administration notified Congress of a planned 320 million dollar transfer of SPICE Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies, with associated support, assembly and testing, from Rafael USA, the company’s American subsidiary, to its Israeli parent. CNN reported that the relevant congressional committees had approved the transfer months before 7 October 2023. The Wall Street Journal explained that transfer in the video below, published on 24 February 2024. It predates the F-35I announcement and is reproduced as the publisher released it.

How SPICE kits turn 1,000 lb and 2,000 lb unguided bombs into precision weapons, and why the United States was sending them to Israel.

The Population: Non-United States Weapons on the F-35

SPICE 1000 joins a short list. The table below covers every weapon developed outside the United States with a publicly documented F-35 integration or service entry, as at 15 September 2026.

The Rest of the Population

The same population read the other way: the remaining F-35 partner and customer nations, each with its variant and with a nationally developed weapon integration recorded explicitly as not publicly documented.

On “not publicly documented”. The entry records the open-source record and no more. It does not mean these nations lack a defence industry or an interest in the aircraft’s weapons; several buy and fly weapons from the first table, Japan among them for the Joint Strike Missile. Germany is a partner nation in the six-nation Meteor programme but is not the recorded integration sponsor for either variant, so it sits here rather than above. National integration requests can exist unannounced, and absence from this table is a finding about the record rather than about any ministry’s plans.

One nation sits outside the population and illustrates why the Israeli route matters. Türkiye’s Roketsan signed a follow-on contract with Lockheed Martin in September 2015 to finish SOM-J, a cruise missile designed from the outset for F-35 internal carriage. Türkiye was removed from the F-35 programme in July 2019, and SOM-J went into serial production in March 2026 aimed at the F-16, the KAAN fighter and uncrewed platforms instead. The same prime, the same kind of partnership and the same internal-carriage goal ended without an F-35 because the national relationship with the programme ended. Rafael’s weapon is reaching the aircraft because Israel’s relationship did not.

Analysis of Effects

The operational logic is not hard to read. The Israeli Air Force has used SPICE from fourth-generation aircraft for years, and the weapon’s selling point is autonomy: satellite and inertial navigation serve as reference and backup on the way in, and an electro-optical seeker matching the scene against stored reference imagery does not depend on satellite navigation in the terminal phase, which matters in an airspace where jamming of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is routine. Rafael’s design figure of 125 km would let an F-35I release well outside the reach of short-range point defences, and would let a squadron that already plans SPICE missions carry the same effect on a newer aircraft. Whether that release can be made from internal stations, and therefore from an aircraft that keeps its low-observable shape, is not in the announcement or the datasheet. The Israeli Air Force is planning for 75 F-35Is in all, and the number of those that can carry the weapon is what will decide how much this matters.

The question the announcement does not answer is where on the aircraft the weapon goes. The F-35A-derived F-35I bay already carries 1,000 lb and 2,000 lb-class direct-attack stores, and SPICE 1000 is built on the same kind of bomb body: a bolt-on guidance kit that converts a 1,000 lb-class bomb such as the Mk 83, with a deployable wing set that gives it its glide range. The wing set is what separates it from a plain guided bomb in the bay, and neither Rafael nor the programme report states whether it will be carried internally or on an external station. The difference is not a detail. External carriage spends the signature advantage that is the reason for using the F-35 at all, while internal carriage limits the load per sortie and requires a bay fit that the public record does not confirm. Until that is published, claims that SPICE 1000 gives the F-35I a stealthy stand-off strike capability are running ahead of the evidence.

Personnel and Safety Considerations

For the people who will handle it, SPICE 1000 on a new platform is a new platform-store pairing, and that carries its own clearance regardless of how long the weapon has been in service elsewhere. The open-source record gives the weapon as 1,000 lb (453 kg) class. Rafael’s datasheet states that the kit is fitted to 1,000 lb or 2,000 lb general-purpose or penetration bodies, blast fragmentation or penetration in effect, and trade reporting names the Mk 83 as a typical 1,000 lb body. Nothing is published on the body actually used for the F-35I: its fill, net explosive quantity (NEQ) and fuze configuration are unknown, so no NEQ in kg TNT-equivalent can be stated here. The hazard division (HD) and compatibility group (CG) of the all-up round are not in the open-source record either; that is a statement about the public record and not about Israeli or United States national classification registers, which are not public. What any such integration requires is well understood even where the specific results are not: carriage environment qualification for the chosen station, including the thermal and vibration environment of an enclosed bay if internal carriage is chosen; safe separation, including the timing of wing deployment after release; mission data handling, since the datasheet describes missions (target imagery, hit angle and azimuth, and fuze delays) held on a mission cartridge loaded onto the weapon before take-off and assigned by the pilot before release, which leaves open who holds planning authority for the F-35I and how the cartridge and aircraft exchange data; assessment of the store against the aircraft’s electromagnetic environment; revised technical publications and loading procedures; and load crew qualification against the new configuration. Israel Hayom’s timeline of months refers to integration; none of these elements is reported as complete.

Data Gaps

The following are recorded as gaps rather than asserted. The specific Lockheed Martin site or sites performing the work are not named; Fort Worth is inferred from the Israeli FMS contract pattern. The contract vehicle funding SPICE 1000 integration is not identified, and neither the July 2025 nor the April 2026 award names it. The relationship between Rafael’s SPICE 1000 and the SPICE 1000B named in the programme report is not stated. Internal or external carriage, and the station, are not published. The announcement gives the family range as up to 120 km against 125 km on Rafael’s datasheet. The warhead body selected for the F-35I and its fill, NEQ, fuze, HD and CG are not published; the datasheet gives only the generic body classes. The datasheet describes an autonomous shot and says nothing about a datalink, so none is assumed. Its issue code suggests March 2024, so it is used here for design figures and not for status. The completion timeline of months comes from secondary reporting, not from Rafael. No round counts are published for the recent operational use. No release policy for other F-35 operators is public.

Editorial responsibility. This analysis is researched, written and published under the editorial responsibility of Steve Sawyers, MIExpE VR. Every technical claim is sourced to named open-source material and rated for reliability and accuracy under NATO STANAG 2022. ISC uses its own domain-trained research and drafting system under human direction; the analysis, the judgements and the accountability for them are ours. Corrections and updates welcome: if you hold open-source data that refines or corrects any parameter here, write to [email protected] citing the specific claim and your source. Verified corrections are incorporated and credited in the revision history. Full editorial and AI policy.