Summary

The U.S.-Israel Alliance Can Fight Together The Pentagon should help close three gaps exposed by the Iran war: campaign termination, regional missile defense, and industrial replenishment The Iran war has demonstrated that the United States and Israel can coordinate military operations at remarkable scale. It has not demonstrated that they can agree on when, how, or under what political conditions the campaign should end. That distinction is becoming harder to ignore. After nearly five months of war, U.S. forces completed thirteen consecutive nights of renewed strikes against Iran in late July. President Donald Trump then ordered a pause as diplomatic efforts intensified; Israel had not participated in those latest U.S. attacks. The shift from sustained bombing toward a possible diplomatic off-ramp illustrates the central problem: operational cooperation remains extensive, but the two allies are increasingly acting on different political clocks. That is not an argument for less cooperation. It is an argument for institutionalizing the cooperation that matters most before tactical success produces strategic friction. The war has already generated valuable operational practices: intelligence sharing, missile-warning coordination, logistics support, battle-damage assessment, air-defense cooperation, and contingency planning. But crisis improvisation is not a strategy. Without standing mechanisms for defining success, managing escalation, and sustaining inventories, the alliance could emerge from the war more integrated militarily yet less aligned politically. The Pentagon should therefore promote three immediate steps. First, establish a standing bilateral framework for campaign planning, escalation management, and war termination. Operational synchronization is not political agreement. Washington may prioritize protecting U.S. forces and maritime navigation, suppressing immediate threats, limiting regional spillover, and creating space for diplomacy. Israel may seek deeper and more durable degradation of Iran’s nuclear, missile, and proxy capabilities. Both positions are strategically intelligible. The danger lies in leaving their differences implicit until one government believes the campaign should end while the other believes its gains must still be exploited. Because war aims and termination are political decisions, the Pentagon cannot resolve this problem alone. It should press the White House to establish a standing bilateral strategic-campaign group connecting the National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon, and U.S. Central Command with their Israeli political, national-security, defense, and military counterparts. During active conflict, the group should convene regularly at senior and working levels to assess campaign objectives, escalation thresholds, measures of effectiveness, acceptable diplomatic off-ramps, and termination criteria. It should also develop shared understandings about ceasefire monitoring and the conditions under which either country might resume military operations. Such a mechanism would not give either ally a veto over the other’s actions. It would reduce strategic surprise. Israel may fear that formal consultation would constrain its freedom of action; U.S. officials may fear that tighter coordination would increase the risk of entrapment. In practice, ambiguity magnifies both dangers. Clearer expectations would allow each government to preserve autonomy while understanding the military and political costs its decisions impose on the other. Second, upgrade existing air-and-missile-defense cooperation into a persistent, federated regional network. Iran’s continued use of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones shows that defensive success cannot be measured by a single interception rate or one round of strikes. Tehran can vary its launch patterns, combine weapons, attack bases and critical infrastructure across the Gulf, and attempt to exhaust costly interceptors. Recent joint U.S.-Qatari defensive operations at Al Udeid Air Base illustrate the increasingly regional character of the missile threat. The United States and Israel should build on their longstanding military and missile-defense cooperation by making regional warning, inventory monitoring, and operational learning more persistent and systematic. Existing exercises have already demonstrated extensive bilateral integration across air operations, missile defense, command structures, logistics, and precision fires. The next step should be a federated network rather than a centralized alliance. Participating governments should retain sovereign control over their sensors, interceptors, and operational decisions while adopting tiered procedures for sharing warning and tracking data. The network should include an interoperable operational picture, joint lessons-learned processes, recurring exercises based on the current war, and contingency plans for deploying U.S. defensive assets. It should also establish agreed inventory-warning thresholds that trigger replenishment orders, production surges, or reviews of interceptor allocation before shortages become operational crises. Regional participation should be modular rather than theatrical. Gulf governments may resist joining an openly anti-Iranian coalition, but they have a direct interest in protecting energy infrastructure, ports, airspace, military bases, desalination facilities, and shipping routes. Quiet technical arrangements, such as data exchange, deconfliction, early warning, and coordinated defense of facilities and corridors, would be more practical than a highly public regional bloc. Third, negotiate a multiyear defense-industrial resilience compact. High-intensity war turns factories and inventories into instruments of strategy. Interceptors, precision munitions, spare parts, maintenance capacity, and aerial-refueling support shape what political leaders believe they can sustain. When inventories appear fragile, Israel may gain incentives to act earlier and more intensively, while Washington may gain incentives to shorten its commitments. Industrial scarcity can therefore widen political differences between allies. A new compact should establish agreed readiness benchmarks, multiyear procurement commitments, surge-production clauses, diversified suppliers, and expanded co-production where operationally and economically feasible. It should cover air- and missile-defense interceptors, precision weapons, critical components, spare parts, and logistics support. The Pentagon and Israel’s Defense Ministry should produce coordinated demand forecasts and assess expenditure rates, production bottlenecks, and replacement timelines after each major phase of operations. Contracts should provide manufacturers with sufficiently predictable demand to retain skilled workers, maintain production lines, and expand capacity rapidly during a crisis. This compact must not subordinate U.S. force requirements to Israeli needs or become an open-ended subsidy. Its purpose should be to expand shared production capacity so that the two allies are less likely to compete for the same limited inventories during an emergency. Budget constraints and production bottlenecks are real, but they are arguments for earlier contracting and clearer priorities, not postponement. The cost of maintaining reserve capacity in peacetime is visible; the strategic cost of discovering insufficient capacity during war is much higher. The Iran war may still strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance. But alliance strength should not be measured by the number of sorties flown together or the intensity of public declarations. It should be measured by whether the partners can define attainable objectives, control escalation, defend themselves sustainably, and terminate a campaign without converting battlefield cooperation into political resentment. The Pentagon’s task is to help transform the improvised machinery of this war into institutions capable of managing the next crisis, and, just as importantly, preventing the current one from becoming permanent.