The order came not from a battlefield but from a committee room. On a Sunday in early May 2026, a panel of senior Israeli ministers signed off on a plan that had been gathering urgency for the better part of a year: buy two more squadrons of American fighters, and buy them now. One squadron of stealthy F-35I “Adir” jets from Lockheed Martin. One squadron of new-build F-15IA Eagles from Boeing. Together, a deliberate doubling-down on the kind of airpower that had just spent a war flying to the edge of the map and back.

For Israel, this is less a shopping list than a statement of intent. The country had emerged from a punishing 2025–2026 campaign against Iran — an operation its government variously called Rising Lion and Lion’s Roar — with a hard-won lesson written across its flight logs: reach matters, and so does the ability to keep reaching, mission after mission, for years on end. The new jets are the answer Israel has chosen.

What does adding two squadrons actually buy a country the size of New Jersey? More than the obvious arithmetic of extra airframes. It buys redundancy, deeper magazines, longer legs, and the political signal that Israel intends to hold its aerial edge well into the 2030s. Here is what the deal contains, and why each half of it was chosen.

What Two More Squadrons Really Add

An air force does not measure power only in aircraft. It measures it in sorties — how many missions it can launch, sustain, and repeat before the machines and the maintainers run out. The Iran campaign, by every Israeli account, ran the existing fleet hard. Some of the older F-15 Baz airframes still in service are decades old, a few tracing their combat histories back to the 1970s. Two new squadrons relieve that strain in the most direct way possible: fresh airframes, modern systems, and crews who can spread the load.

The approval, the Israeli Ministry of Defense said, would eventually bring the air force to four F-35I squadrons and a second F-15IA unit — a fleet trending toward roughly 100 stealth jets and 50 new Eagles over the coming years. The ministry did not put a precise aircraft count on the order; defense reporters inferred around 25 of each, in line with how Israel has structured recent purchases. Treat the “~50 jets” figure as an educated estimate, not an official number.

There is also a deterrence logic that has nothing to do with day-to-day operations. Announcing a major buy in the immediate wake of a war tells adversaries that Israel does not intend to draw down, recover, and hope for quiet. It intends to come out of the conflict with a larger, more modern force than it went in with. That message is aimed at Tehran, but it is heard across the region.

The F-35I “Adir”: A Stealth Jet Israel Made Its Own

The F-35 is the most-produced stealth fighter in the world, flown by more than a dozen nations. But the Israeli version is unusual. When Israel signed on as a customer, it secured something most F-35 operators do not get: permission to bolt its own systems onto the jet. The result carries a Hebrew name, “Adir” — roughly, “Mighty” — and a degree of national fingerprinting that sets it apart from every American, British or Japanese F-35.

The most consequential Israeli additions are unglamorous and largely invisible: command, control, communications and computing systems developed domestically, primarily by Israel Aerospace Industries, that let Israel load its own mission data, threat libraries and weapon interfaces without depending on an outside vendor for every update. Israeli electronic-warfare components, much of it Elbit Systems work, supplement the standard suite. And the Adir can carry Israeli-made munitions — from the Python-5 air-to-air missile to SPICE precision-guided bombs — alongside the American weapons in the F-35 catalogue. The pilot’s helmet, too, leans on Israeli display technology, Elbit being a co-developer of the broader F-35 helmet program.

This matters because sovereignty in software is sovereignty in war. An air force that can reprogram its own jets overnight, against threats it discovered that afternoon, fights differently from one waiting on a foreign release cycle. That is the capability Israel paid extra to secure — and the reason a fourth Adir squadron is treated as a strategic priority rather than a line item.

Israel already operates two Adir squadrons, including the famous 140 “Golden Eagle” Squadron at Nevatim, and had a third squadron on order before this announcement; reporting puts the delivered fleet at roughly 45 to 48 jets out of 75 already contracted. In recent combat the type has done things no F-35 had done before, including, by Israeli account, the first air-to-air kill of a crewed aircraft by an F-35 — a claim Israel attributes to its own pilots and one worth flagging as Israel’s, not an independently confirmed fact.

Official Israeli Air Force footage of an F-35I “Adir” flying over Israel.

The F-15IA: Not Your Father’s Ra’am

If the F-35 is the scalpel, the F-15 is the sledgehammer — and Israel has loved the sledgehammer for a long time. Its legacy F-15I “Ra’am” (“Thunder”), 25 of which entered service between 1998 and 1999, became the backbone of Israeli long-range strike: a two-seat, deep-penetration Eagle built for the missions that go far from home. Those jets, powered by Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 engines, are now well into middle age.

The new F-15IA is a different animal. It is Israel’s version of Boeing’s F-15EX Eagle II — the first brand-new Eagles Israel will have received since 1999, not refurbished hand-me-downs. Where the Ra’am carries 1990s avionics, the IA is built around an APG-82(V)1 active electronically scanned array radar, fly-by-wire flight controls, a digital cockpit with large-area displays, and the structural muscle to haul more weapons — including outsize standoff and air-launched ballistic weapons that Israel increasingly relies on. Specialist sources, including GE Aerospace and Boeing, identify its engines as two General Electric F110-GE-129s — a switch in engine family from the older Ra’am, and a detail worth attributing rather than stating from memory.

The first F-15IA squadron is already under contract. Israel signed a deal in late 2025 — a Boeing contract with a ceiling reported around $8.6 billion — for 25 of the jets, with an option for 25 more. This new ministerial approval, in plain terms, is Israel reaching for that option. Deliveries of the first batch are not expected to begin until around 2031, at a modest four to six aircraft a year, with work slated to run into the mid-2030s. The 2024 U.S. clearance had already authorized Israel to buy as many as 50 F-15IAs. So the May 2026 decision is the second tranche of a plan years in the making — not a sudden new purchase.

Two Jets, One Strategy

Why buy both at once? The conventional analysis — and it is analysis, not gospel — holds that the two aircraft do complementary jobs. The F-35I, with its stealth and sensor fusion, is the platform for kicking down the door against modern air defenses: penetrating, finding, and surviving in contested airspace. The F-15IA, with its enormous payload and long range, is the platform for following through — carrying the heavy ordnance, the standoff missiles, and serving as an airborne command-and-control node that ties a long-range operation together. Stealth opens the path; the Eagle delivers the weight.

That division of labor is exactly what a country planning for repeated long-range campaigns would want. Israel’s purchase also lands at a moment when the F-15’s new lease on life is being validated elsewhere: the U.S. Air Force itself recently expanded its own F-15EX plans, a vote of confidence in the airframe Israel is buying.

None of this is cheap, and none of it is fast. The jets will arrive over years, not months, and much of the funding is wrapped inside the decade-long “Magen Israel” program — a roughly $120 billion bet on the next ten years of Israeli defense, of which these two squadrons are only the opening move. But the direction is unmistakable. A country that just fought a war at the limit of its reach has decided the answer is to reach further, and to make sure it never has to choose between the scalpel and the sledgehammer again.

Sources: The War Zone; Breaking Defense; Times of Israel; Reuters; Army Recognition; Jerusalem Post; GE Aerospace.