The Pentagon-IDF Merger: A Global Scandal Hidden in Section 224

As debate swirls over whether there is a rift between the U.S. and Israeli political leaderships, something far more consequential and lasting is unfolding in the background. The silence surrounding a plan that would bring the American and Israeli militaries into much deeper integration can itself be read as a broad political signal: the entire American information sphere, regardless of partisan preference, clearly wants this plan to pass with as little "interference" from the American public as possible.

In the version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) planned for 2027 and published last week, Section 224 is titled "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative." This provision would likely do more to intertwine the U.S. military with Israel’s than around $200 billion in military aid (roughly adjusted for inflation) that Israel has received from the United States since its founding in 1948.

What is Section 224? Under the banner of an innovation hub and military-technological cooperation, the provision proposes a deeper connection between the Israeli military and the Pentagon. The term used here, fusion, may at first sound like a neutral word for modernization. Politically, however, it is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to embed Israeli defense interests permanently within the architecture of the U.S. military. American support for Israel has, as we know, been enormous for decades, from financial assistance and arms deliveries to diplomatic protection at the United Nations. But this new level of integration goes beyond conventional aid. It creates a space in which aid, technology transfer, joint production, systems exchange, and access to planning are transformed into an internal mechanism of the American military-industrial complex.

Scandalous? Very much so. But, it is hard to say which is the greater scandal here: the fact that what might fairly be called a "merger of the IDF and the Pentagon" is being set in motion, or the fact that something this important has received almost no coverage in the major American media.

This needs to be made clear. This is not merely "military aid." It is the first time the U.S. military is opening itself from within to another state in such a way that certain technological secrets, still central to America’s military advantage, will simply be made available to another actor.

It is worth recalling that Israel does not have the formal status enjoyed by NATO members. There is no U.S.-Israel "Article 5," no mutual defense treaty legally obliging Washington to defend Israel in the same sense in which it speaks of its allies in the Atlantic alliance. Israel, of course, has for decades enjoyed a privileged position that, in practical terms, often exceeds the formal structures of alliance. Section 224 could now turn that position into an institutionalized norm.

The intelligence-security dimension further complicates the entire story. After September 11, the U.S. intelligence system underwent a powerful process of integration. Agencies that once operated in separate silos and closed circles now function through interconnected networks. The larger and more connected the system, the greater the risk posed by every privileged access point.

The question is whether America even cares about that risk. Many would say it should, especially given the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, which is not quite as perfectly allied as it may appear at first glance.

American military secrets: the route through Israel to America’s rivals

The Jonathan Pollard case remains the best known. The U.S. naval analyst handed Israel a vast quantity of classified American documents, and for decades an even more sensitive suspicion followed the affair: that some of the material that ended up in Israeli hands was later used in dealings with the Soviet Union.

The China cases are even more important for today’s debate because they concern technology, industry, and military modernization. Israel spent decades developing its own defense industry with American money, American technology, and American political protection, only for some of that knowledge to end up, through various channels, in China. U.S. assessments and congressional reports linked Israeli technology from the Lavi project to China’s J-10 fighter jet, while the disputes over the Phalcon system and Harpy drones showed just how concerned Washington was about Israel’s willingness to do business with the Chinese military. In one later case, Israel claimed that equipment had been sold to a European company and then ended up in China, which only further illustrates how difficult it is to control such chains once sensitive technology leaves the original American circle.

A relationship the "Five Eyes" club can only dream of

This debate goes beyond the question of Israel. It speaks to the condition of the American state. Congress increasingly functions as the final stop for texts written by lobbies, industrial actors, and outside centers of interest. Lawmakers then vote on enormous packages that hardly anyone reads in full. In such a system, the most important political decisions pass through provisions that look technical, while their real consequence is to change the country’s strategic orientation. When such a mechanism is combined with a powerful pro-Israel lobby, the result is a policy in which a small state with extraordinary influence gains access that many formal allies can only watch from the sidelines.

Some members of the U.S. Congress will object — some already have — people such as Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna. But we have seen how the system treats them. Trump turned so sharply on Massie that he treated him almost like a national threat. Opposition to Section 224 can be marginalized very easily because, though it exists, it does not command a majority.

American sovereignty is being dismantled here through a scheme in which access to the Pentagon is treated as a natural right of Israel’s security apparatus. Section 224 ought to be the subject of a major public debate, but there is none. And while the public is fed stories about Trump-Netanyahu rift, something is taking place in the background that can quite comfortably be called a megaproject of IDF-Pentagon integration.

Britain and the other members of the "Five Eyes" club — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States — can only dream of such a level of trust and support. Trump, it seems, is using his second term primarily to fuse the United States and Israel into a single political-strategic body, as if that were his main, perhaps even his only, task. The consequences will be enormous; indeed, we are already seeing them. We have a world under energy blockade as a direct result of U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran, and we can only guess what else is being planned, because the key plans, unlike Section 224, are certainly not being laid out in PDF documents.