For a few weeks now I’ve been pondering why the United States is binding its defense industry to Israel’s through a provision in the 2027 defense authorization bill. The cover story is integration: shared development, shared procurement, shared supply chains. The actual story is reduced leverage. A state that co-produces a weapon loses sole control over it. The tighter the integration, the smaller the room to refuse. This is something so obvious and yet the bill’s sponsors do not discuss it. I guess that’s what makes me want to write now.
The case is best made through one congressman, because he has documented every stage of it himself.
In March 2016 Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama’s Third District, published a column titled “We Must Support Israel.” He said this view came from him as an American and a Christian. His support for Israel, he said, was something he heard demanded across East Alabama for religious, historic, and defense reasons. He then described his own position. As chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee, he oversaw the Missile Defense Agency, which runs co-development and co-production programs with Israel. He had worked on Iron Dome. Iron Dome parts, he noted, were being produced in Alabama. His column states in 2016, a decade ago already, every element of the relationship that Section 224 makes permanent: conviction, constituency, jurisdiction, and local industry.
The Strategic Forces subcommittee authorizes US funding for Israeli missile defense. Rogers’s predecessor as chairman, Mike Turner, recorded that his subcommittee provided over $600 million to Iron Dome. Rogers used the chair the same way. In one markup he recommended an increase of more than $400 million for the Missile Defense Agency and full funding of the Israeli request, $600.7 million, for co-development and co-production of Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow.
That recommendation turned into work for his district. In September 2014, as Strategic Forces chairman, Rogers announced a contract worth nearly $150 million to produce parts for the Iron Dome Tamir interceptor. Significant work, he said, would occur for his constituents in Huntsville. He presented it as a jobs measure: home commitment to Israel and good-paying jobs at home in one act.
So the chairman of the subcommittee that funds Iron Dome directed more than half a billion dollars to the program while parts of that program were manufactured in his district. He announced both in press releases. This was a proud arrangement, not hidden. It was constituent service, and he campaigned on it openly. The all-up-round assembly plant, the Raytheon-Rafael joint venture, later went to East Camden, Arkansas; Alabama’s share is the Huntsville component work.
What seems to change is that level of integration. For most of its history the US-Israel defense relationship ran on aid, arms transfers, joint missile-defense programs, and intelligence cooperation. The arrangement was legible and reversible. An administration could withhold a system, slow a sale, or condition a transfer.
A right of reversibility has eroded in stages. In January 2021, in the final days of his first term, Trump moved Israel from US European Command into Central Command. The Pentagon called the change partly symbolic and said it would not alter US basing. It was far more than symbolic. CENTCOM is a US combatant command under a US four-star officer. Placing Israel in its area of responsibility put it in the same command framework as the Gulf states, under one American general, aligned against Iran. The Abraham Accords seemed like the connection.
Five years later, this setup was running a war operation called Epic Fury. The blended US-Israeli campaign against Iran, which began on February 28, 2026, meant US strikes coordinated with Israeli intelligence and cyber operations. An IDF spokesman called the cooperation unprecedented. The relationship moved quickly from provision to joint operation, as if the tail wags the dog.
Critics had said Section 224 would fuse the two militaries and place American forces under Israeli control. Ro Khanna called it a fusion of the US and Israeli militaries. Rogers defended the bill by restating the charge against it. He called the claim categorically false and misleading. The measure, he said, adds transparency and efficiency by designating one official to coordinate existing programs.
In no way does it give away command and control of our military operations, personnel or equipment.
The denial is precise, a little too precise. A chairman defending a coordinating measure does not ordinarily rule out, by name, the transfer of his country’s operations, personnel, and equipment to a foreign military. He used exact terms and very strangely. The disputed question is not whether the bill assigns a coordinating role to one official. It does. The question is whether coordination at this depth, in these technologies, is a significant change. Rogers says business as usual. Khanna and Massie say whoa, Bessie.
Section 224 of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act establishes the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. It directs the defense secretary to designate an executive agent to expand and accelerate bilateral research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation. The named priority areas include artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber defense, electronic warfare, and data fusion.
The relationship has gone from sharing to joint development. Mark Hilborne of King’s College London reads it as a tighter form of integration, institutionalised enough to survive changes of administration, because development cycles are long. The nonprofit A New Policy identifies the specific mechanism. By authorizing the cooperation through the NDAA and embedding Israeli technology in Pentagon programs of record, Section 224 shields the relationship from the annual appropriations process, where Congress could otherwise cut or condition it. Once a technology is built into a program of record, removing it is slow and expensive. Rogers has designed a lock.
The sponsorship reinforces all this. The bill was introduced by Rogers, now chairman of the full House Armed Services Committee, with Adam Smith, the committee’s ranking Democrat. A measure carried by both the chairman and the ranking member is difficult for either party to reverse.
Opposition has been recorded and defeated. On June 4 Ro Khanna moved in the Armed Services Committee to strike Section 224. The committee rejected the amendment on a voice vote; only Khanna and Sara Jacobs supported it. Khanna argued the provision originated with Netanyahu and would entrench the integration for decades. Thomas Massie, who with Khanna introduced an Iran War Powers Resolution, calls the measure an infringement on US sovereignty. Both objections concern entanglement and lost leverage.
Massie lost his Republican primary last month to a challenger aligned with the administration’s position on Israel. Rogers has received close to a million dollars over his career from pro-Israel political action committees, by FEC data compiled by Track AIPAC. His Democratic cosponsor draws from the same source: by OpenSecrets’ tally the largest single organizational source behind Adam Smith is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated donors, at $326,914. The bipartisan structure that makes Section 224 durable rests on one funding source reaching both parties.
Below AIPAC on Smith’s donor list are the defense firms: General Atomics, Palantir, General Dynamics, SpaceX, Anduril. These companies build the technologies Section 224 names as priorities, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and data integration. The ideological backer and the commercial beneficiaries appear on the same list.
The lobby operates through contributions and endorsements, which are lawful and disclosed. OpenSecrets states the limit of the evidence: contribution patterns show aligned interest and a channel of influence, while the motive behind any single gift is unknowable. Both men held pro-Israel positions before any one cycle’s contributions. The money and the conviction are consistent with each other. Neither has to be buying the other.
The strongest form of the influence argument has been stated directly. In Responsible Statecraft, Michael Vlahos argues that Israel’s influence over Washington exceeds every prior case of foreign influence in American history; where France, Britain, and the Soviet Union acted opportunistically and briefly, Israel’s is ideological, sustained, and permanent. The argument is a polemic, and it compares closed historical cases with one still open, which favors its conclusion. But note where Vlahos lands. He shows us three American constituencies: secular neoconservatism, a Christian Zionist bloc, and the organized lobby.
The mechanism is visible in Rogers’s state. The Alabama-Israel Task Force, founded in 2013 in Huntsville, organizes Jewish and Christian activists to cultivate the state’s legislators, governor, and senior officials. Its results are documented: a role in Alabama’s 2016 anti-BDS law, among the strongest in the country, and in resolutions supporting Israeli military operations. The history precedes the group. In 1943 Alabama was the first state to call, by unanimous resolution, for a Jewish state. The conviction Rogers cited in 2016 is produced, in part, by organized advocacy.
The cultivation runs nationally as well. In December 2025 a delegation of more than a thousand US pastors and influencers, some from Alabama, traveled to Israel on a Friends of Zion program arranged with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which paid for flights and lodging. The stated aim was to prepare them as unofficial advocates for Israel at home. A foreign government funding the cultivation of American religious advocates is a form of influence. The American Conservative raised the relevant question, whether American religious leaders should be mobilized for a foreign government’s interests, and described the pastors as willing participants. They are Americans glad to say their convictions are subsidized by a foreign state.
This is the same mechanism Rogers described in 2016: an American and a Christian, hearing it from his district, building the parts in his state. The bill’s critics and its sponsor agree on what drives the relationship; they disagree on whether it serves US interests. The drivers are domestic conviction, organized money, and material interest located in specific districts. This is influence and entanglement. It is not foreign control.
The cost of the integration appears in the government’s own assessment. In recent weeks the Defense Intelligence Agency raised its counterintelligence threat level for Israel to critical, its highest, reportedly above every other ally. The concern is Israeli surveillance of senior US officials to read the administration’s deliberations on Iran. The context is a policy split: Trump claims he could end the war through a negotiated settlement with Tehran (after failing to make bombs work); Netanyahu has pressed to resume bombing and called any negotiated deal naive. The DIA dates the increase in surveillance to late 2024 and through 2025, rising as US policy on Iran grew uncertain, first under Biden’s pressure over Gaza, then under Trump’s deliberations. The collection tracked the uncertainty.
The designation is itself evidence against the claim of foreign control. A captured military does not raise its threat level on the supposed captor during a shared war. US counterintelligence is functioning. The episode demonstrates the leverage problem instead. The closer the integration, the less the United States can withhold, and the integration has never been closer than under the bill now in committee. It advances as US public support for the relationship declines, with polls showing the Iran war unpopular and majorities opposed to unconditional arms transfers.
The pattern is an American arrangement built by Americans, funded by American money, through a bill carried by the chairman and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, and designed to outlast the administrations that follow. It is constructed to resemble ordinary legislation: bipartisan sponsorship, a single coordinating official, a stated assurance that command and control remain in US hands.
Rogers chaired the subcommittee that funded the interceptors whose parts are built in his district.
In 2016 he told his constituents the relationship should never be in question.
In 2026 he wrote the provisions to ensure it cannot be.
