Israel's 'Custom' F-35 Stealth Fighter: A Lethal, High-Tech Wonder Weapon?

David Axe

Security, Middle East

Thanks, America. 

Israel is practically a launch customer for the American-designed F-35 stealth fighter. The Jewish state plans on declaring its first squadron of the radar-evading jet combat-ready by the end of 2017.

That’s just two years after the U.S. Marine Corps’ declaration of war-readiness for its F-35s — and one year later than the U.S. Air Force’s own planned introduction of the new plane.

And Israel’s F-35s will be unique. While most foreign customers of the stealth fighter plan to operate fairly standard F-35s, Tel Aviv is heaping its own special tech onto the airframe.

And that’s not the only way in which Israel’s F-35s will be unique. The country should also possess a regional F-35 monopoly for at least a decade after bringing the stealth fighters into service.

Israel has a long tradition of adding unique hardware and software to jet fighters it acquires from abroad. With their fuselage-mounted fuel tanks, enlarged spines for housing avionics and other additions, Israeli air force F-16s are distinctive compared to their more mundane American counterparts.

With U.S. approval, the Israeli F-35I will possess a locally-designed command-and-control system that adds to the plane’s existing capabilities. On April 3, Israel Aerospace Industries announced that it had completed testing of the new add-on, which amounts to a software-driven radio interface that Benni Cohen, an IAI manager, described as being similar to a smartphone app.

“It’s open architecture, which sits on the F-35’s central system, much like an application on your iPhone,” Cohen  Defense News. “It paves the way for additional advanced capabilities to be embedded in the F-35I in the future.”