(Photo credit: Adobe Stock/Ala)
Within the span of a few weeks, Israel announced plans to manufacture Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) domestically while reportedly studying a major investment in long-range cruise missiles. Viewed separately, they appear unrelated.
Together, they reveal something far more significant: Israel is quietly reassessing how it prepares for war.
For much of its history, Israel’s defense strategy rested on several assumptions. Wars would be fought quickly. Technological superiority would offset numerical disadvantages. Air power would dominate the battlefield. And close strategic cooperation with the United States would help ensure access to the world’s most advanced military equipment.
The wars since Oct. 7 have not overturned those assumptions. They have demonstrated that they are no longer sufficient by themselves.
Modern conflicts consume precision-guided munitions at extraordinary rates. Supply chains can be disrupted, production cannot always keep pace with demand, and even the closest allies must balance competing military needs, industrial capacity and political pressures. The lesson is not that the United States is an unreliable partner. It is that no ally, however committed, can substitute for a nation’s own ability to sustain a prolonged war.
The emerging emphasis is not simply on acquiring better weapons, but on ensuring the capacity to produce them in sufficient numbers, replenish stockpiles quickly and maintain operational freedom regardless of outside circumstances. Domestic production of JDAMs, expanded manufacturing of artillery shells and missile interceptors, and interest in affordable long-range precision weapons all point in the same direction. They are investments not merely in hardware, but in strategic endurance.
Recent wars have reinforced the same lesson elsewhere. Ukraine demonstrated that industrial capacity can be as decisive as battlefield tactics. A nation unable to replace the weapons it expends eventually surrenders the initiative, regardless of how sophisticated its military may be. Israel’s experience reinforces that conclusion.
The United States has reached a similar realization. After years of emphasizing smaller counterinsurgency campaigns, it has begun rebuilding its defense industrial base in preparation for potential conflicts with peer competitors such as China. Israel is responding to the same strategic reality on a different scale: In modern warfare, the ability to produce and replenish weapons has become an essential element of military power.
That represents an important evolution in Israeli strategic thinking. The objective now appears broader: not simply to field one of the world’s most capable militaries, but to ensure it can sustain that advantage if a conflict proves longer, costlier and more demanding than anyone anticipated.
Cruise missiles are not the story. JDAMs are not the story. Israel appears to be adapting its defense strategy to a new era — one in which endurance, industrial capacity and strategic flexibility matter as much as technological excellence. That does not diminish the importance of innovation or the U.S.-Israel alliance. Rather, it recognizes that lasting military superiority depends not only on possessing advanced weapons, but on the ability to replace, replenish and sustain them throughout a prolonged conflict.
If that assessment is correct, historians may look back on these procurement decisions as more than routine acquisitions.
They may see them as the first visible signs of a broader strategic reassessment that could shape how Israel prepares for future conflicts.