Israel's New Military Doctrine: Fortress Israel 2.0

The war against Hamas in Gaza and on six other fronts has forced Israel to rebuild its defense industry, reduce reliance on allies, and prepare to fight future wars with full strategic autonomy.

photo: IDF/X

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

---

In the disoriented period after the October 7th Hamas-led pogrom, Israel leaned reflexively on U.S. weapons caches and emergency shipments to sustain combat operations. It revealed how deeply the Jewish state had allowed its defense posture to become contingent on others.

While the U.S. continued supplying arms — despite spasmodic political disagreements with then-President Joe Biden — international censure escalated rapidly. The humanitarian toll in Gaza, which Hamas’ propaganda amplified and distorted, became a cudgel in foreign capitals. Several of Israel’s traditional allies began to suspend or constrict arms exports.

That Israel ever permitted itself to reach such a state of dependency is strategically indefensible. The reckoning has come. Israel is now aggressively reducing that reliance and is, in the jargon of national security professionals, expanding its strategic autonomy.

No country is fully autarkic in defense production, nor should any aspire to be. However, Israel is shifting toward a new paradigm: What it cannot produce, it must source from a diversified constellation of partners, not a single hegemon nor from a partner less invested in Middle Eastern politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2025, Jerusalem established a new Munitions Directorate, tasked with identifying critical vulnerabilities and rebuilding local capacity in everything from small-caliber ammunition to complex defense systems. Leading the charge are Israel’s storied defense firms: Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Elbit Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries. Their weapons’ success in Israel’s seven-front war has led to an Israeli defense export boom. Now they are turning that momentum inward, expanding domestic production.

In January 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Defense awarded Rafael a $5.2 billion contract — financed via U.S. military aid — to expand production of Iron Dome and David’s Sling, and to operationalize the next-generation Iron Beam laser defense system. This investment marked the first tranche of the $8.7 billion U.S. supplemental aid package passed in April 2024. Crucially, it facilitates the localized production of the Iron Dome’s Tamir interceptors, in tandem with America’s Raytheon, thereby enabling Israel’s Air Defense Array to restock without awaiting Washington’s green light.

Israel’s predicament is that even as it builds self-sufficiency, it remains tethered (for now) to American largesse. Still, domesticating production is a step toward immunity from the caprice of foreign politics. In parallel, Rafael and Raytheon opened a joint facility in Arkansas, producing Tamir missiles for both Israel and the U.S. — a canny move that intertwines industrial interests and blunts the edge of potential political estrangement.

In October 2024, Rafael and Elbit clinched a $536 million contract to mass-produce the Iron Beam, a directed-energy weapon designed to neutralize rockets, drones, and other projectiles at light speed. It is now been deployed and, should Israel get dragged into a potential war between the U.S. and Iran, Israel would be using these as some scale for the first time.

The early months of combat in Gaza also revealed that Israel’s inventory of more mundane munitions (artillery shells, tank rounds, aerial bombs) was alarmingly thin. This should not have been a surprise. It is the logical outcome of a post-Cold War mindset that prioritized just-in-time logistics and peacetime efficiencies over strategic depth. The war since October 7th, the longest Israel has fought, jolted Israeli officials into rediscovering the grim arithmetic of attrition warfare. Production lines for essential munitions had been mothballed in prior decades, leaving the Israel Defense Forces exposed to perilous shortfalls.

By mid-2024, Israel commissioned Elbit Systems to develop and manufacture heavy air-dropped munitions, which Israel usually buys from the U.S., initiating the construction of an entire indigenous supply chain. This pivot followed the Biden Administration’s decision to delay shipment of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs due to concerns about their use in densely populated Gaza. That brief delay was a strategic thunderclap. It proved that even Israel’s most essential patron could blink.

In response, Elbit subsequently began building a new munitions plant in Ramat Beka (in the Negev) to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells, tank rounds, and the Iron Sting, a precision laser- and GPS-guided mortar shell.

Israel has since adopted a doctrine of maintaining baseline production in peacetime to allow rapid surge capacity in wartime — a rational correction to decades of offshoring and deindustrialization that outsourced core capabilities for marginal fiscal savings. The Jewish state’s tradition of armored self-sufficiency, epitomized by the Merkava tank and Namer (an Israeli armoured personnel carrier), was born of embargo, developed after the 1967 and 1973 wars taught Israel that foreign indulgence could be fleeting. Yet, by 2023, the Merkava production line had slowed to just 24 tanks a year, barely enough for peacetime replacement.

That posture is no longer tenable. The Ministry of Defense is accelerating production of the Merkava Mk-4 and Eitan APC to help form a new armored division. Simultaneously, a sweeping refurbishment program is restoring and retooling vehicles worn down in Gaza.

Still, limitations persist. Israel remains reliant on the U.S. for advanced fighter aircraft such as the F-35, and on Germany for Sa’ar 6 corvettes and Dolphin-class submarines. No country, not even the U.S., produces every strategic system endogenously. Advanced submarines and fifth-generation fighters require an industrial depth that Israel does not possess, and the development of such equipment is usually shared among multiple nations. It will produce the consumables and platforms it can (munitions, drones, armored vehicles) while importing or co-producing irreplaceable systems.

Beyond tanks and artillery, Israel is fortifying its advantage in unmanned systems, autonomy, and AI-driven warfare. As a pioneer in unmanned aerial systems (such as the Heron, Hermes, Orbiter drones), Israel faced no critical drone shortfalls during the Gaza campaign.

But the war did expose new vulnerabilities such as drone swarms, loitering munitions, and electronic spoofing. In response, Israeli defense firms are accelerating the development of next-generation UAVs, anti-drone capabilities, and AI-enabled targeting systems. The future architecture of war is being drafted in labs from Haifa to Beersheba.

Israel’s strength in cybersecurity, aerospace, and electronics is being harnessed to reduce reliance on foreign technology, especially as the West grows more cautious about dual-use exports. This is an investment in innovation and a hedge against the day when courts, bureaucracies, or public pressure abroad might cut Israel off from essential technologies.

Jerusalem has also begun developing more advanced space‑based capabilities — essentially better eyes in the sky — specifically to strengthen its defenses against arch-enemy Iran, whose ballistic missiles can reach Israel in just 10 minutes. Israel is one of just 13 countries that can launch satellites, which is an extraordinary achievement for such a small state. Its satellite launch system is believed to have the dual function of also launching its Jericho ballistic missiles, which speaks to remarkable engineering and versatility. The Israel Defense Forces have said that successfully fighting a seven-front war over the past two years would not have been possible without its satellite capabilities.

The U.S. remains Israel’s indispensable ally, but the Gaza war introduced hairline fractures in the alliance — fine fractures that could splinter under future political conditions. In the first days after October 7th, President Biden redirected artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel. Between late 2023 and mid-2024, the U.S. delivered $21.7 billion in weapons: Hellfire missiles, JDAM kits, bunker busters, and more. Yet as the war dragged on, political pressure mounted in Washington — especially from the Left.

Three fault lines emerged.

First came delays and conditionality. In early 2024, the U.S. began attaching strings to arms transfers. Later that year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Israel that further shipments might be contingent on improving humanitarian access to Gaza. This is what caused the “bunker-buster” delay.

Second came public criticism. Biden called Israel’s campaign “over the top.” Left-wing lawmakers, many swallowing Hamas’ propaganda uncritically, demanded arms restrictions. The war became a domestic liability for the White House.

Third came Israeli disillusionment. Jerusalem interpreted U.S. hesitancy as a form of strategic coercion. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had warned of the dangers of dependency before the October 7th attacks, found his case confirmed. Israel’s trust in American permanence was shaken. Although aid resumed, the notion that U,S. support might one day be suspended has now entered Israeli strategic planning.

While U.S. arms kept flowing, a roster of Israel’s democratic allies (Canada, the UK, Spain, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan) either suspended or curtailed military exports. Some, like the Netherlands, acted under court order. Others, such as Spain and Canada, yielded meekly to political agitation or as a form of ideological warfare. Their cumulative impact on Israel’s war effort was negligible, but the message was strategic nitroglycerine: Israel can no longer presume Western solidarity in wartime.

Netanyahu responded with predictable defiance; Israel adapted quickly; and the creation of the Munitions Directorate, the reactivation of idle factories, and a flood of domestic contracts were all direct responses to this diplomatic volte-face. While U.S. President Donald Trump has been more supportive, he is also selling arms to states across the region such as Saudi Arabia, so his administration if far less predictable than previous ones.

A new doctrine is emerging: Fortress Israel 2.0. The original fortress ethos, born in the 1940s and refined in the 1970s, was about geographic isolation and demographic peril. Today’s version is about supply chains, procurement sovereignty, and industrial depth.

Its rationale is unapologetically realist: operational continuity (no more running out of shells mid-campaign), strategic sovereignty (no more recalibrating tactics to appease foreign capitals), sanctions immunity (no more vulnerability to embargoes and diktats), energy security (no more relying on a single refinery for drone fuel), and industrial resilience (no more exporting Israeli defense capital abroad).

Israel is internalizing the need to fight alone if it must, and never again to find itself with empty magazines while the world debates morality based on lies. The goal is not isolationism, but strategic redundancy: the ability to fight and endure even if the world turns away.

The war in Gaza has revised Israel’s strategic playbook. The intelligence failure of October 7th was one shock. The supply-chain vulnerability that followed — that Israel could not replenish munitions without U.S. crates — was another. Israel has moved swiftly to correct this. Factories are humming. Contracts are flowing inward. Weapons once imported are now being stamped in Hebrew.

This is not isolationism. It is realism of the sort that Israel must practice if it wishes to endure. Israel will still need allies. It will still buy submarines and jets. But its deterrent backbone (its missiles, tanks, drones, and shells) must be its own.

When the next war comes, as history promises it will, Israel intends to enter it not as a client, but as a sovereign — with magazines full, factories alight, and no illusions about the mercy of others.

---