Stuxnet was 500 kilobytes of code, and it wrecked roughly 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility. IEEE Spectrum reported that leaks from officials in the United States and Israel “strongly suggest that those two countries did the deed.” It remains the best-known product of a partnership that Washington and Jerusalem rarely discuss in public: the sharing of intelligence and the joint planning that goes with it.
Few documents spell out how that works. What is on the public record comes from congressional research, think-tank analysis and press reporting, and it paints a picture of a relationship built on both formal agreements and shared operations.
A relationship written into law and budgets
The Congressional Research Service traces the political commitment back to Israel’s founding in 1948. Since then, in its words, successive U.S. Presidents and many Members of Congress have shown “a commitment to Israel’s security and to close U.S.-Israel cooperation.”
The money side is easiest to follow. On September 14, 2016, the two governments signed a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding covering fiscal years 2019-2028, the third of its kind. Washington pledged “$38 billion in military aid,” made up of $33 billion in foreign military financing grants and $5 billion in defense appropriations for missile defense. Every dollar is “subject to congressional appropriation.” Israeli negotiators had wanted about $45 billion.
Some of that pays for shared defense work. The MOU sets aside “$500 million in annual combined funding” for Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, and the United States has put “over $6 billion” into Iron Dome alone. Two standing bodies, the Joint Political Military Group and the Defense Acquisition Advisory Group, coordinate planning and procurement. The two militaries also train together, including in the “Juniper” exercise series.
Underneath it all sits a policy known as the qualitative military edge. Written into law in 2008, it requires that U.S. arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries be checked for any harm to Israeli military superiority.
What Israel brings back
This is not a one-way street. In a 2013 Washington Institute analysis, David Pollock and Michael Eisenstadt argued that Israel “has contributed to American ‘hard security’ through counterterrorism cooperation, intelligence sharing and the development of such innovations as unmanned aerial vehicles and missile defense.” They put American support since 1949 at over $115 billion, and still concluded that Washington “will continue to benefit greatly” from the alliance.
The benefits reach ordinary people too. Pollock and Eisenstadt noted that Israeli medical experts, drawing on “expertise honed over decades of treating victims of terrorist attacks,” helped Massachusetts General Hospital update its disaster protocols, which proved useful when the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing struck.
Stuxnet: the joint operation on record
The clearest example of operational teamwork came out in 2012. The Register, summarizing reporting from journalist David Sanger’s book “Confront and Conceal,” said US and Israeli officials jointly developed the Stuxnet cyberweapon. The effort, codenamed Olympic Games, started in 2006 under the Bush administration as an alternative to military strikes. General James E Cartwright designed it within US Strategic Command, and Israel’s Unit 8200 helped build the malware.
Engineers tested the code on P-1 centrifuges that Libya had surrendered. Operatives with physical access planted the worm at Natanz around 2008. In 2010 the code escaped because of design flaws, yet President Obama authorized the work to continue with new variants.
Neither government has officially claimed the operation, and Kaspersky researcher Roel Schouwenberg said researchers concluded early on that “there was no doubt that this was nation-state sponsored.”
An arrangement with an end date
For families across the region, from Manila to Jerusalem, the practical question is whether this cooperation keeps threats from spilling into daily life. The funding framework, at least, has a clock on it. The CRS says the 2016 MOU runs out in 2028, and both governments have started preliminary talks on what replaces it.
Sources
- U.S.-Israel Security Cooperation (Congressional Research Service report)
- How the U.S. Gains from Israel Alliance (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy)
- US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli op (The Register)
- The Real Story of Stuxnet (IEEE Spectrum)
