The Defense Ministry's Director General, Major General (Res.) Amir Baram, issued a stark warning on Wednesday about delays to Israel's long-term military buildup, telling the 22nd Herzliya Conference at Reichman University's Institute for Policy and Strategy that the country's readiness is falling dangerously behind schedule.
Baram pointed to months of budgetary foot-dragging that have stalled implementation of the IDF's decade-long force buildup plan, a roughly 350 billion shekel program already approved by the prime minister and defense minister. He said Israel's long-term force buildup is in dangerous delay, and warned that the Finance Ministry's budget division, which he said treats the implications of the wartime reality as a passing accounting matter, is undermining the government's ability to carry out decisions on long-term force buildup that have already been made.
He drew a sharp contrast with Iran, warning that in the second half of 2026 alone, Israel's enemy is expected to invest sums in building its military capabilities comparable to Israel's entire ten-year plan, while Israel remains bogged down in bureaucratic obstacles that amount to neither strategy nor industrial execution. Baram said that after nearly three years of war, if Israel continues on its current path, the risk to the country's adapted security readiness will become very high.
On the Iranian threat itself, Baram warned that emerging international agreements that could funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into Iran risk dramatically accelerating its own military buildup. He said Israel must respond by advancing its own tailored force buildup and pushing forward a new regional security architecture, first and foremost with its strategic ally the United States.
Baram also addressed the state of the US-Israel partnership directly, cautioning that Israel should not judge current American policy through a provincial lens. What some in Israel interpret as weakness or folly, he said, is in fact viewed in Washington as cold, calculated and clear-eyed risk management in an era of shifting global attention. He argued the gap between Jerusalem and Washington is not one of threat perception but of priorities, since Israel sees Iran as an existential threat while the United States sees it as a chronic regional challenge, with China and the Indo-Pacific as its core concern. Baram put it succinctly: Israel thinks Tehran, America thinks Taiwan.
He noted that from the Pentagon's perspective, with American munitions stretched between supporting ongoing wars and preparing for a potential conflict over Taiwan, a prolonged Middle East war runs counter to US global strategic interests. At the same time, based on his own familiarity with the range of views inside the American system, Baram said that if there is one thing Americans hate more than this drawn-out war, it is losing a campaign they had already won. He said that as the US operates under an America First approach, the partnership with Israel cannot rest on shared values alone but must also be grounded in cold interests, namely a strong, independent and proactive Israel that stabilizes the Middle East and frees up American resources to focus on Asia. He said this is the foundation of the next security partnership memorandum of understanding currently being formulated, one that will need to generate security, economic and strategic benefits for both countries for years to come.
Baram also addressed criticism over the pace of interceptor production, saying that over the past year he was forced as director general to invoke the full range of emergency authorities available to him, even without budgetary backing. He said the ministry attacked supply-chain bottlenecks, carried out critical cross-continental procurement of raw materials, signed export deals that expanded domestic production lines, and recruited dedicated manpower for the defense industries. He said that thanks to these real-time emergency measures, Israel's stockpiles of Arrow, David's Sling and Iron Dome interceptors are now growing even in the midst of the fighting, though he cautioned that the work is far from finished.
