In June, US Vice President JD Vance reminded the Israeli ministers who had criticized the new understanding between Washington and Tehran that two thirds of the defensive weapons protecting Israel had been built and paid for by the United States. President Trump went further at the G7 summit in France, stating that without the United States there would be no Israel and that the country would have been destroyed long ago had he not intervened.

Both remarks were offered as reassurance. They also measure how much of Israel’s defense now depends on Washington, and they raise a question its planners can no longer postpone. If so much of the defense over Israel is American, what happens to its most sensitive site if the United States decides to scale back that support?

The Shield Over the Negev Has an Owner

The issue is political before it is military. The THAAD batteries stationed on Israeli soil, several of them in the Negev near Nevatim, do not belong to Israel. They are US Army systems, operated by American soldiers at roughly ninety per battery, and they were deployed by presidential order in October 2024. Their number grew through 2025 until Israel became the largest foreign host of THAAD outside the United States.

The contrast with Israel’s neighbors is instructive. The United Arab Emirates purchased its own THAAD batteries in 2011, and Saudi Arabia signed a fifteen billion dollar agreement for its system in 2017. Those states own the systems that defend them. Israel does not own the THAAD batteries on its territory but hosts American ones, and a deployment authorized by a US president can be ended by one.

What the War Actually Showed

The 2026 war showed how much of the upper tier of that defense Israel had effectively delegated to the United States. American forces fired more than two hundred THAAD interceptors in Israel’s defense, close to half the Pentagon’s total inventory, along with more than one hundred SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors from Navy ships.

Over the same period, Israel fired fewer than one hundred Arrow interceptors and about ninety from David’s Sling. The expenditure left the United States with a reduced THAAD reserve that cannot be replaced quickly, a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)