According to leaks to the US media, Washington has suspended arms shipments to Israel, something that never happened before, despite all the disagreements both with Israel and within the US. How critical is this for the IDF in the context of a large and bloody operation in Rafah and Khan Younis, which will be an “all-out war of annihilation” for Israel?
On the eve of the start of a new operation of the Israeli army in the southern Gaza Strip, it became known that Washington postponed the sale of precision weapons to Israel. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal newspaper with reference to sources. According to them, it is about the sale of about 6.5 thousand JDAM guidance kits, which can convert conventional aircraft munitions into guided munitions. The US Congress was told of the $260 million deal in January, but lawmakers never received official notification.
“This is unusual, especially with Israel, especially in a time of war,” a congressional source told the publication. Since March, the process of notifying Congress about the sale of weapons worth $1 billion to Israel, including tank ammunition, military equipment and mortar shells, has also been stalled.
In turn, the Axios portal, citing two Israeli officials, reported that Washington had suspended ammunition deliveries to Israel for the first time since October 2023, a move that has caused serious concern among Israeli authorities, who have begun to investigate the reasons for the delay. However, a White House spokesman, John Kirby, did not confirm the data, saying that US commitments “to Israel’s security commitments are unwavering.”
What is really going on with US arms deliveries to Israel? How critical is all this to the IDF and the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government?
The general concept of the IDF is to achieve military and technical superiority over everyone around it. A small and sparsely populated state torn by political and ideological squabbles was going to defend itself against the multi-million Arab world through the quality of its armaments. This concept began to develop actively after the 1973 Doomsday War, the last war in which Israel was in roughly equal technical conditions with the Arab countries, and in the field of air defence was even inferior to Egypt and Syria, which received the latest Soviet systems, which led to critical losses for the Israeli Air Force.
Israel also lagged behind in anti-tank weapons and infantry combat tactics, which led to heavy losses in the first counter-offensive attempt in the Sinai, when the Egyptians destroyed an entire IDF tank brigade in close combat with Soviet grenade launchers. After that, Tel Aviv set a course to develop advanced systems that would ensure absolute technical superiority over the Arabs, and in a broader sense over the USSR.
This superiority was not achieved in all areas, but the IDF has been engaged in self-piracy for decades, which gave rise to the myth of the “most technologically advanced” and “most effective” army in the world. The last year has shown that the myth is just a myth.
For example, Israel is fixated on the creation of the Merkava super-heavy tank, which was supposed to be ahead of Soviet anti-tank systems in development (the eternal “armour – grenade” race), and then on integrated air defence systems, better known as “Iron Dome” and “David’s Board”. The development of their own aircraft was abandoned due to the high cost of development and the lack of their own industrial base, although in the 1970s the Kfir fighter based on the French Mirage was quite a successful project.
Then began the development of drones. Israel did not achieve great heights in this field, but it was one of the first on the market when there was no alternative to its drones.
The main problem of the Israeli army is the lack of industrial capacity for the production of conventional weapons, which are consumed en masse: drones, shells, bombs, small arms. The authorities have not worried much about this due to the belief that all of Israel’s future wars will be solved through the use of high technology: “Iron Dome” will shoot down all the primitive missiles of the Arabs and Persians, retaliatory strikes of high-precision bombs will stop the breakthrough attempts, and invulnerable tanks “Merkava” will complete the defeat. Artillery ammunition had not been stockpiled in adequate quantities.
But the war in Gaza followed a different scenario. The IDF’s “total war” required a huge consumption of ammunition, especially artillery and tank ammunition, as well as heavy aerial bombs capable of penetrating concrete fortifications. Additionally required are the very JDAM guidance systems that the US has “jammed”.
In addition, the giant arms depot created by the Pentagon on the territory of Israel in 1984 with the aim of hypothetical participation in a major war in the Middle East against the USSR turned out to be empty. In 2022, 300,000 155-mm artillery shells were taken from there for Ukraine, which damaged the Israeli government’s relations with Kiev.
That said, Israel is itself a major arms exporter. A major deal was made last September, just before the conflict escalated: Germany bought the Israeli Arrow 3 anti-missile system, designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, for $3.5 billion.
It turns out that there is something to sell, but Israel lacks the capacity to supply its own army. Last October, when U.S. President Joe Biden announced an increase in military aid to Israel, there were two telling deals: tank ammunition and components for the production of the textbook 155mm artillery shells. These were exactly the kind of deals that were within the purview of Congress and required its approval.
According to other reports, the Biden administration did roughly what “coach” Elena Blinovska did for tax evasion: the deals were broken down into smaller pieces, each falling short of the number that would require a Congressional visa. Thus, thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, and small arms were supplied to Israel (some IDF units converted to American assault rifles instead of locally made Galileos).
It’s a special story with aviation. The F-16s are becoming obsolete, but the US and Israel have an agreement for $3.8bn over 10 years to maintain that very “qualitative superiority”. Israel has used much of that grant to buy F-35s: 75 have been ordered, and 35 have already been delivered. Israel became the first country in the world to use these fifth-generation fighters in combat: in Gaza they are used as platforms for heavy bombs, but they have not participated in air battles in the literal sense of the word – there is no one to fight with.
Another half a million dollars is allocated annually by the US to maintain the Iron Dome: the missiles are quickly running out.
The US is not the only arms supplier to Israel, just the largest. Another thing is that, for example, Germany and the UK do not supply Israel with conventional shells, but with individual electronics components for air defence and air force, and Italy with naval components and helicopters. All this is important, but it is not paramount in the context of Gaza.
In other words, the IDF is missing the very component that is most needed now, but for decades was not seen as important.
The strategy of destroying Gaza as a phenomenon requires the use not of “high-tech” but of “conventional” projectiles, which are in short supply in Israel. With this in mind, the slowdown in U.S. supplies can be seen as a pressure factor on Israel, or at least a demonstration of Washington’s dissatisfaction with the way the Israelis are handling their security problems with Gaza.
The White House needs to somehow quell the wave of pro-Palestinian protests and student riots in America, hence the leaks to the press. But the Biden administration can again pull off a small-batch arms transfer operation that bypasses Congress. The only problem is that these parties have been submitted to the budget committee for approval, and it is difficult to win back in the context of an election campaign.
The shortage of shells and the components to make them is unlikely to slow down the offensive on Rafah. But it will create a problem for the future, because the Israeli MIC will have to restructure itself to produce conventional weapons at the expense of exporting something high-tech, and there are no funds, capacity or even labour for that now. Military spending will rise no matter how quickly and to what extent military co-operation with the US is restored, and export revenues will fall sharply. And that’s a different story for Israel, which has lived since the mid-1980s in relatively hothouse conditions, which has allowed it to dabble in so-called advanced weapons. Iron Dome is powerless against a hoe, but it is quite realistic to shoot down a drone with a hoe or even with a duffel bag, as even the experience of the NWO has shown.