Kent: Integrating U.S., Israeli Militaries Will Give Israel Imprudent Access to U.S. Military Secrets

Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Joe Kent is warning about the danger of an Israel-first provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would permanently entangle the U.S. and Israeli militaries, making them almost one.

Introduced as free-standing legislation, Section 224 of the NDAA, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, Kent argues at Responsible Statecraft, will provide Israel access to “critical defense production technologies.” 

The upshot is, Congress wants to permit wide-ranging access to military, intelligence, and technological secrets by a nation that has proven it will steal those secrets and share them with America’s enemies. That’s what Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard — an American traitor — did in the mid-1980s.

The Initiative

The initiative will “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation,” the measure says, by a number of means, including:

• identifying jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs … ;

• ensuring collaborative research initiatives involving government, private sector, and academic institutions in the United States and Israel, … in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel; …

• establishing frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry. …

The two militaries would cooperate on “missile and air defense technologies” as well as cyber-defense, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence.

There’s more, but the plan is this: Israel gets access to everything.

The measure “would fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber,” Ben Freeman wrote for Responsible Statecraft:

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 give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S. By expanding or starting 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.

Kent: It’s Bad for America

Kent explained that public support for Israel is disappearing among Americans rapidly, which jeopardizes the billions in annual aid the nation receives from cash-strapped American taxpayers.

“To get ahead of the changing sentiments, Israel and their American allies, like U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are attempting to rebrand the aid we give to Israel each year,” Kent wrote:

Rather than the annual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlays, anything we give Tel Aviv will be “based on trade,” according to Huckabee. The goal of this shift is to undermine the notion that Israel is dependent on American hand-outs and that the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill for the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza and Lebanon. There is, of course, a major catch.

That catch is, Kent wrote, the measure to merge the Israeli and American militaries, which will “give Israel unprecedented access to U.S. technology development and ‘data fusion.’”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports it, of course, because the measure moves “Israel from a top U.S. aid recipient to a full member of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus.”

That means “we are creating access and control mechanisms for a nation that has drastically different goals than America does,” Kent continued:

We should instead keep the development of key technologies restricted to Americans only. The dangers of allowing any other nation to access our sensitive military technologies are obvious, including the fact that back doors and spyware can be installed that will most certainly be used by the Israelis to influence U.S. policy. …

A more troubling aspect of this scheme is that it allows Israeli manufacturers to operate production facilities in the U.S. with an American partner. This stands in contrast to the standard way America provides military support to nations; historically the weapons that the U.S. provides in arms packages are all made in the U.S. by American manufacturers. Section 224 will give Israel the ability to actually create jobs in America. This is a powerful talking point that will give Israel leverage with many members of [C]ongress and the American public.

Israeli companies would have an “edge” over American companies inside the Pentagon, Kent wrote. But the argument that the United States needs Israel to create American jobs is as fallacious as Huckabee’s claim that almost $4 billion in aid to Israel redounds to American benefit because the Israelis use the money to buy American weapons, and therefore is cycled back into the economy.

“This assumes that we need to give a foreign nation money to fund our defense industry,” Kent explained:

This is nonsense, We should instead invest the $3.8 billion directly on weapon systems for our own inventories or sell them to nations that don’t need to pay for it with American aid money.

Second, the majority of the profits from the defense sector don’t go into creating American jobs or back into American communities, they go to the CEO’s profits and stock buy backs. This has been an issue that President Trump himself has raised. …

We are a sovereign nation. We cannot outsource components of our national security to nations that do not share our interests; they will put their own interests first every time. No other government prioritizes the needs of a different country before its own, because that would be foolish. Israel can still be a decent partner, so long as we are clear-eyed about the differences between our two countries and act accordingly.

American needs, Kent said, come first.

Possible Israeli Treachery

Kent, who opposes aid to Israel, didn’t mention another dangerous aspect of the measure.

U.S. officials will never be sure Israel isn’t retailing military, intelligence, and technological secrets to China, Russia, or other hostile nations.

Though Israel is touted as America’s “most reliable ally,” it had no qualms about penetrating U.S. Navy intelligence with Pollard. An intelligence analyst, Pollard stole classified secrets and gave them to Israel from June 1984 until authorities arrested him in November 1985. Israel likely transferred them to the Soviet Union. The information that Pollard gave to Israel might have killed American intelligence assets.

Huckabee didn’t much care. When he ran for president in 2011, he campaigned for Pollard’s release. He also secretly met with Pollard at the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.