Deal Expands Israeli F-35 Fleet by Fifty Percent

The Israeli Defense Ministry (IDM) announced on 02 July 2023 that it has committed to purchasing 25 F-35 fighter jets from the United States. The deal increases the size of Israel’s F-35 fleet by fifty-percent.

The F-35 is a controversial platform, championed by its supporters as the world's most advanced fighter jet, and impugned by its detractors as a half-baked, technologically immature, malfunction-prone farce at once incapable of fighting and fleeing. Both parties to the dispute agree, however, that the F-35 is shockingly expensive, and—at a total lifetime fleet expenditure of $1.7-trillion—history’s costliest military program.

Israel’s 25 new F-35s come with a kingly price-tag of $3-billion and will increase the Middle-Eastern nation’s contingent of the fifth-generation fighter-jets from fifty to 75 airframes. The deal’s fine points are to be hammered out over the coming months.

Israel’s Defense Ministry reported the purchase is to be financed through American military aid to Israel, and that Lockheed-Martin, which builds the F-35, and Pratt & Whitney, which produces the aircraft’s 43,000-lbf F135-PW-100 engine, have committed to involving Israeli companies in the production of the 25 newly-purchased aircraft.

In a statement the IDM set forth: "The new agreement will ensure the continuation of cooperation between American companies and Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft parts.”

The move to supplement Israel’s military might coincides with heightened tensions between Jerusalem and Tehran.

Israel, which has existed in a state of perpetual war with vast tracts of the Arab world since the former’s 1948 founding, has previously used its extant F-35s to shoot down Iranian drones. What’s more, the Knesset—Israel’s unicameral legislature—has threatened to use the nation’s F-35s to carry out long-range strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.

Israel accuses Iran of attempting to develop nuclear weapons—a charge Tehran denies. Additionally, Israel is believed to be behind a years-long string of surgical attacks on Iranian nuclear experts and facilities.

Seeking to counter Iranian entrenchment in neighboring Syria, Israel—on Sunday, 02 July—conducted an airstrike on the western-Syrian city of Homs. The strike was one of hundreds carried out by Israeli forces on Syrian targets in recent years.

FMI: www.gov.il/en