Daniel sent us this one, building on something we talked about a while back — Israel's habit of taking American airframes and basically rebuilding the nervous system inside them. He's asking specifically about electronic warfare suites. What are we actually talking about when we say "onboard EW"? And what would push a military like Israel's to rip out an American EW package and wire in its own? Because apparently they do this on almost everything they fly, and they also keep dedicated jamming aircraft in the air. So where do we even start?
The thing to understand right off the bat is that when we say "electronic warfare suite," we're not talking about one box. It's more like a nervous system spread across the entire aircraft. You've got radar warning receivers that listen for threats, you've got jammers that broadcast noise or deceptive signals back, you've got chaff and flare dispensers for when things get kinetic, and all of it is tied together by a central processor that's making decisions faster than the pilot can blink.
It's not just a loudspeaker strapped to the wing.
Far from it. A modern EW suite is listening across a huge swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, cataloging every radar emission it detects, comparing those signatures against an onboard threat library, and then deciding — in microseconds — whether to jam, deceive, or just flag it for the pilot. And it's doing this while the aircraft's own radar is transmitting, while the datalink is chattering away, while a ground-based SAM site sixty miles away just switched on its targeting radar.
The musical equivalent of trying to pick out a single violin in an orchestra where everyone is playing a different piece.
That's actually not far off. And the Israeli Air Force operates in one of the most electromagnetically dense environments on the planet. You've got Syrian air defense systems, some of them Russian-supplied and quite modern. You've got Iranian-backed militias in Lebanon with increasingly sophisticated radars. You've got the Russian presence in Syria operating their own EW systems, which by the way have been known to jam GPS across the entire eastern Mediterranean. You've got Egyptian radars to the south, Jordanian systems to the east, and whatever naval radars are operating off the coast.
The neighborhood is loud.
The neighborhood is deafening. And here's the first thing most coverage misses — the F-35's EW suite, for example, is extraordinarily capable, but it's designed to deal with a generic set of threats. Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems build it for the median scenario across all customers. Israel's threat environment is not median.
What does that actually mean in practice? Give me something concrete.
Think about the SA-22 Greyhound, the Pantsir system. It's a Russian-made short-to-medium-range air defense system that Syria operates. It uses a phased-array radar that can track multiple targets and it's paired with both missiles and guns. The American EW threat library has signatures for the Pantsir, absolutely. But the Pantsir systems that Syria operates have been modified. They've been tweaked by Russian technicians, they operate on slightly different frequency sets, they've been integrated with Syrian command-and-control networks in ways that produce unique emission patterns.
The stock American threat library is like having a field guide to birds where they've drawn the cardinal, but the actual cardinal in your backyard has a slightly different song.
And Israel's ELTA Systems and Elisra — these are subsidiaries of Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit respectively — they've been collecting signals intelligence on these specific systems for decades. They know what the Syrian Pantsir radars actually sound like, because they've been listening to them since the day they were uncrated. So when they build a custom EW suite for the F-16I Sufa or the F-15I Ra'am, they're loading it with a threat library that's been populated from actual theater-specific SIGINT.
Alright, so that's one reason. Better ears for the specific threats they actually face.
The second piece is about jamming effectiveness, and this gets into some physics that I genuinely find elegant. When you're jamming a radar, you need to know exactly what frequency it's operating on, what its pulse repetition frequency is, what its scan pattern looks like. If you get any of that wrong, your jamming signal doesn't match the radar's receiver bandwidth and it gets filtered out as noise.
You're shouting into the wrong room.
You're shouting into the wrong room. And modern radars use something called frequency hopping — they jump between frequencies dozens or even hundreds of times per second. The SA-10 Grumble, the S-300 system, is notorious for this. If your jammer can't track those hops in real time, you're essentially bringing a boombox to a chess match.
The Israelis have figured out how to track the hops.
They've invested enormously in what's called digital radio frequency memory, or DRFM. This is a technique where the jammer captures the incoming radar pulse, stores it digitally, modifies it — maybe adding a Doppler shift to fake a different velocity, or adding a time delay to fake a different range — and then retransmits it back. To the enemy radar, it looks like a real return. It's not noise, it's a lie.
The radar thinks it's getting an honest echo, but it's been fed a forgery.
A forgery so precise that the radar's own signal processing accepts it as genuine. And the Israelis were pioneers in DRFM technology. Elisra developed some of the earliest operational DRFM jammers in the nineteen-nineties and they've been iterating ever since. The American systems use DRFM too — it's not that they don't — but the Israeli implementations are tuned for the specific radars they expect to deceive, and they're integrated with Israeli-made self-protection suites that combine jamming, towed decoys, and expendable countermeasures in ways that are optimized for their specific mission profiles.
Explain that one.
Imagine a small transmitter on a cable, deployed behind the aircraft. When a radar-guided missile is incoming, the decoy emits a signal that looks more attractive than the aircraft itself. The missile locks onto the decoy, which is now physically separated from the aircraft by a few hundred feet of cable. The missile hits the decoy. The aircraft flies home.
It's like dragging a fake duck behind your boat during hunting season.
A fake duck that's screaming "I'm the real duck" in the missile's native language. And Israel's been using towed decoys on their F-16Is and F-15Is for years. The specific systems are classified, but open-source analysts have identified the housing and deployment mechanisms on Israeli jets that differ from the standard American fit.
You mentioned dedicated EW aircraft earlier. The prompt asks about those too. What's the difference between what's on every jet and what a dedicated platform brings?
This is where scale enters the picture. The self-protection suite on an F-16I is designed to keep that specific aircraft alive. It's got enough power to jam the radars that are directly threatening it, and it's got enough processing to handle the threats in its immediate vicinity. A dedicated EW aircraft like the Gulfstream G550 Nachshon — Israel operates several variants of these — is a different beast entirely.
A converted business jet doing electronic warfare. There's something deeply Israeli about that.
The Nachshon fleet is fascinating. They're based on the Gulfstream G550 airframe, which gives them long endurance and high altitude capability. The Shavit variant handles signals intelligence — it's basically a flying vacuum cleaner for electromagnetic emissions, sucking up everything across the spectrum and feeding it back for analysis. The Eitam variant is the airborne early warning and control platform. And there's a third variant that handles dedicated electronic attack.
One listens, one watches, one shouts.
Crudely put, but yes. And the shouting one — the electronic attack variant — it's not just trying to protect itself. It's trying to blind an entire integrated air defense network. We're talking about jamming radars across hundreds of miles, disrupting communications links between ground control and missile batteries, injecting false targets into enemy surveillance radars to create confusion about where the actual strike package is coming from.
The difference between wearing a bulletproof vest and operating a smokescreen for an entire battalion.
And the power requirements alone tell you why this can't just be bolted onto a fighter. A dedicated jamming aircraft has generators that can pump out enormous amounts of radio frequency energy. The AN/ALQ-99 jamming pods on the American EA-18G Growler, for comparison, each contain a ram air turbine that generates their own electricity — they're basically small windmills in pods. The Israeli systems are similarly power-hungry.
You've got self-protection jammers on every fighter, and then these flying broadcast towers for when you need to blind the whole neighborhood. What's motivating Israel to build both instead of just relying on American gear?
I think there are three big drivers, and they're all connected. The first we've already touched on — the threat library specificity. When your primary adversary operates Russian and Chinese radar systems that have been customized and integrated in ways the standard American threat library doesn't fully capture, you need your own database.
They can't just share that SIGINT with the Americans and have them update the standard package?
They do share some of it. The intelligence cooperation between Israel and the US on air defense threats is extensive. But there's a difference between sharing intelligence and getting it baked into a production EW suite that's going to be deployed across the entire F-35 fleet, including to countries whose security interests don't perfectly align with Israel's.
So it's not just about capability, it's about control.
It's about sovereignty over the electronic order of battle. If Israel discovers a new radar mode on a Syrian Pantsir system, they can update their own EW suites within days or weeks. If they have to wait for the American acquisition process to validate that intelligence, integrate it into the standard software build, test it, and push it out through the Joint Strike Fighter program office — that could take months or years.
The speed of the bureaucracy versus the speed of the threat.
In electronic warfare, the threat evolves constantly. Radars get software updates. New systems get deployed. Operating frequencies change. If your EW suite is six months out of date, you're flying blind against threats that have already moved on.
You mentioned three drivers. What's the third?
The third one is the most sensitive, but it's also the most important. It's about operational independence. When Israel flies a strike mission, they don't always tell Washington in advance. There have been well-documented cases where the US has been informed only after Israeli aircraft are already in the air, or even after they've returned. If your EW suite is entirely American-supplied, with American-controlled software and American-controlled threat libraries, you've essentially given a foreign power a veto over your ability to operate.
Because they could theoretically withhold updates or even disable systems remotely.
In practice, the US has never done anything like that to Israel, and the relationship is extraordinarily close. But military planners don't plan for the best-case scenario. They plan for the worst one. And the worst case is that you're flying into contested airspace and your EW suite is running software that someone else decided you should have, with threat libraries that someone else decided to share with you.
It's the same logic that drove Israel to develop their own missiles and their own drones. You don't want the key to your survival in someone else's pocket, even a friend's pocket.
This is where the F-35 gets particularly interesting. The F-35I Adir — that's the Israeli variant — is unique among all F-35 operators in that Israel was allowed to integrate its own electronic warfare systems and its own command-and-control interface into the aircraft. Every other F-35 customer gets the standard package. Israel got to crack open the fuselage and wire in their own gear.
How did they pull that off politically?
It took years of negotiation. The US was deeply reluctant, partly because the F-35's software architecture is designed as a closed system — the whole point is that everything is integrated and tested as a single package. Letting a foreign country modify that risks introducing vulnerabilities or compatibility issues. But Israel argued, successfully, that their operational environment was unique enough to warrant the customization, and that they had the technical capability to do it without compromising the aircraft.
The Americans bought that argument.
They did, with conditions. The modifications had to be certified to not interfere with the core F-35 systems. But the fact that Israel even got that concession tells you how seriously they take electronic warfare sovereignty. They were willing to absorb the cost and complexity of maintaining a custom EW package on the most advanced fighter in the world, alongside the standard American package, just to ensure they had their own tools in the toolbox.
Walk me through what's actually different on an Israeli F-16I or F-35I. What gets swapped out?
On the F-16I Sufa, the big one is the Elisra self-protection suite. The standard American F-16 carries the ALQ-211 or ALQ-131 pods, depending on the block. The Sufa has an integrated internal system that combines radar warning, jamming, and decoy control — all Israeli-designed. There's also the integration with Israeli-made munitions. The Sufa can carry the Spice precision-guided bomb and the Python air-to-air missile, and those have their own datalink and guidance requirements that the EW suite needs to be compatible with.
Because if your jammer is screaming across a frequency band that your own missile's datalink uses, you've just defeated yourself.
And that's the kind of integration problem that's much easier to solve when you control both the jammer and the missile. Israel's defense industry is unusually vertically integrated for a country of its size — Elbit, IAI, and Rafael all work closely together, and they're all answerable to the same customer.
What about the F-15I?
The Ra'am has a similar story. It carries an Elisra self-protection suite that replaced the standard American TEWS, the Tactical Electronic Warfare System. The Israeli system includes a radar warning receiver with what's believed to be a much more comprehensive threat library for Middle Eastern emitters, plus an integrated jammer that covers a wider frequency range than the standard American fit.
Wider frequency range because the threats are more diverse?
But also because Israel faces threats that operate in frequency bands that most American adversaries don't use. Hezbollah, for example, has been documented operating Iranian-supplied radars and communications gear that use commercial off-the-shelf components repurposed for military use. Those systems operate on frequencies that a standard military jammer might not cover, because they weren't designed for military radar bands.
They're jamming what are essentially modified cell phone towers being used as targeting radars.
That's not far from the truth. And this is where the dedicated SIGINT platforms — the Shavit aircraft — become essential. They're the ones doing the listening, cataloging these weird, non-standard emissions, figuring out what they are, and then feeding that intelligence back to update the threat libraries on the fighter EW suites.
It's a whole ecosystem. The SIGINT plane listens, the analysts catalog, the engineers update the software, and the fighter jocks get the new threat library before their next mission.
The cycle time on that loop can be astonishingly short. During the twenty-twenty-one conflict with Hamas, there were reports of Israeli EW systems being updated mid-operation based on new signals intelligence gathered in real time. A UAV would detect a new radar emission, the Shavit would characterize it, and within hours the self-protection suites on the strike aircraft had the new signature in their threat libraries.
That's the kind of agility you can't get from a foreign supplier.
You absolutely cannot. And this connects to something that I think is underappreciated about electronic warfare in general. Most people think of EW as a defensive thing — it's the countermeasures, the jammers, the chaff. But in the Israeli doctrine, EW is deeply offensive.
If you can blind an adversary's air defense network, you've essentially created a corridor through which your strike aircraft can fly as if the airspace were uncontested. That's not defense. That's enabling offense. The dedicated electronic attack platforms — the Nachshon variants — they're not there to protect themselves. They're there to tear a hole in the enemy's situational awareness so that the F-16s and F-35s can do their work.
The jamming is the spear, not the shield.
This is a doctrinal difference that matters. The US Air Force tends to treat electronic attack as a supporting function. It's something the Growlers do to enable the strike package. Israel treats it as a primary combat function, on par with dropping bombs. The electronic attack aircraft is a shooter, just with photons instead of explosives.
Which probably explains why they invest so heavily in customizing it.
If you view EW as a supporting function, you can tolerate a certain amount of generic capability. If you view it as a primary weapon system, you want it optimized to the hilt.
Let me ask you something that's been nagging at me. We've talked about why Israel customizes — the threat library, the speed of updates, the operational independence. But is there a downside? Does ripping out the American gear and wiring in Israeli stuff create problems?
The first and most obvious is cost. Customizing an EW suite isn't cheap. You're paying for the Israeli system on top of the American one that came with the airframe, even if you're not using all of it. You're also paying for the integration testing, the software maintenance, the ongoing updates — all of which are now your responsibility instead of Lockheed Martin's.
You're trading money for control.
The second downside is interoperability. One of the advantages of the F-35 program is that every F-35 is supposed to be able to share data with every other F-35, seamlessly. When you start modifying the systems, you risk creating compatibility gaps. Israel has had to work very hard to ensure that their customized F-35Is can still interoperate with American F-35s during joint exercises — and with their own older platforms, which are also heavily customized.
It's the curse of the bespoke suit. It fits perfectly, but it doesn't always match what everyone else is wearing.
The third downside is probably the most acute one. When you customize a system that deeply, you're betting that your own engineers are smarter than the ones at BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin combined.
That's a bet.
It's an enormous bet. The American EW industry has resources and experience that no single country can match. They've been doing this for seventy years, across hundreds of platforms, with budgets that dwarf anything Israel can bring to bear. When Israel decides to go its own way on a particular subsystem, they're saying "we can do this specific thing better for our specific use case." And sometimes that's true. But it's not true by default.
Have they ever gotten it wrong?
There are rumors — and I want to emphasize these are unconfirmed — that some of the early Israeli EW customizations on the F-16I had integration problems that took years to fully resolve. Nothing catastrophic, but issues with false alarms, with the jammer interfering with the aircraft's own radar, that kind of thing. The kind of problems that the standard American suite had already worked out through decades of operational experience.
The boring integration work that doesn't make headlines but determines whether the pilot trusts the system.
Trust is everything in electronic warfare. If your radar warning receiver is crying wolf, pilots start ignoring it. If they ignore it once too often, they fly right into a real threat. The Israelis learned that lesson the hard way in the nineteen-seventies, during the Yom Kippur War, when some of their early American-supplied EW gear proved inadequate against the new Soviet SAM systems.
That's actually an interesting historical pivot. Was the Yom Kippur experience the thing that kicked off the whole Israeli EW industry?
It was the catalyst. In nineteen seventy-three, the Israeli Air Force lost over a hundred aircraft in nineteen days, many of them to radar-guided SAMs. The American-supplied jamming pods of the era — the ALQ-71 and ALQ-87 — were designed for the Vietnam threat environment. They were not optimized for the SA-6 Gainful, which was a new Soviet mobile SAM that operated on frequencies the American pods didn't cover well.
They flew into a threat environment with the wrong countermeasures and paid for it in blood.
The response was an all-hands effort to build indigenous EW capability. Elisra was already in existence, but after nineteen seventy-three they received essentially a blank check. The goal was simple: never again fly into a threat you haven't prepared for. That's when the serious investment in DRFM jamming began. That's when the SIGINT collection shifted into high gear. That's when the doctrine of electronic attack as a primary combat function really crystallized.
Fifty-plus years later, they're still operating on the same principle.
The threat has only gotten more complex. We haven't even talked about the Iranian dimension.
Iran operates Russian-supplied S-300 systems, and they're developing their own indigenous air defense radars. The Bavar-373 is an Iranian long-range air defense system that they claim is comparable to the S-300. Whether it actually works as advertised is debatable, but the point is that Israel's EW suites need to account for a threat library that includes Iranian-designed radars with unknown performance characteristics and unknown operating modes.
Unknown unknowns, as the saying goes.
The only way to prepare for unknown unknowns is to collect signals intelligence continuously, analyze it obsessively, and make sure your EW systems are flexible enough to be reprogrammed rapidly when something new appears. A closed, foreign-supplied EW suite can't do that. An indigenous one, maintained by your own people with your own intelligence feeding into it, at least has a fighting chance.
When we look at an Israeli F-35I or an F-16I, what should we picture? What's actually different under the skin?
Picture the standard aircraft. Then picture an additional layer of Israeli-designed antennas distributed around the fuselage — these are the receivers that feed the radar warning system. Picture a set of black boxes in the avionics bay that are running Israeli software, with Israeli threat libraries, connected to Israeli-designed jamming transmitters. Picture a cockpit display that's been modified to present the EW picture in a way that Israeli pilots are trained on from day one. And picture all of it tied into the aircraft's datalink so that the EW picture from one jet is automatically shared with the rest of the formation.
It's not just a different radio. It's a different nervous system.
On the dedicated platforms — the Nachshon fleet — picture a Gulfstream business jet whose cabin has been gutted and filled with operator consoles, signal processing racks, and antennas that bulge from fairings along the fuselage. These aircraft fly orbits at high altitude, far from the threat, and their job is to see everything and blind everything.
There's something darkly funny about a business jet being one of the most dangerous aircraft in the theater.
The Gulfstream is the glockenspiel of corporate approachability, repurposed as an instrument of electromagnetic chaos.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, Norse settlers in Greenland maintained a theory that cinnamon's warming properties were not from its essential oils, but from microscopic sun fragments trapped in the bark during the tree's growth — this was considered mainstream medicinal doctrine in the Norse Greenland settlements until the colony's collapse.
Trapped in the bark. Makes as much sense as most sixteenth-century medicine, I suppose.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com. If you haven't yet, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps. We'll be back next week.
