1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

Lawmakers should reject Section 224 from the NDAA to avoid deep integration with Israel's military! Congress just proposed tying the U.S. to the Israeli military more than ever before. Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data. If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world. It would fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the U.S. beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would also give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand or start new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas. The Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on U.S. soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie. The result could well be a U.S. political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the U.S. into military conflicts in the Middle East. This unprecedented level of U.S.-Israeli military integration stands in stark contrast to the traditional aid model of defense cooperation, in which Israel already stood out as the top recipient of U.S. military assistance. (About 3.5 billion dollars yearly.) The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.