Israel Aerospace Industries

Israel Aerospace Industries traces back to 1953, when the Israeli government set up Bedek Aviation to keep the young air force's planes flying. It renamed itself IAI in the 1960s and has stayed wholly owned by the state ever since, though a partial privatization has been discussed for years. Today it runs four business groups that together make it the largest state enterprise in Israel's defense sector. ELTA Systems is the electronics arm, responsible for radar, signals intelligence, and electronic warfare. It builds the family of radars behind Israel's layered air and missile defense, supplies airborne and ground-based early warning systems, and has moved into cyber and robotics work over the past decade. The Systems, Missiles and Space Group handles everything that flies on a trajectory rather than wings: the Arrow interceptor family (Arrow 2 and the exoatmospheric Arrow 3, developed jointly with Boeing and the US Missile Defense Agency), the Barak family of naval and land-based air defense missiles built with Rafael, and surface-to-surface systems like LORA.

This group also runs IAI's space business, building the Ofek reconnaissance satellites and Amos communications satellites for the Israeli government and commercial operators, plus the TecSAR radar-imaging satellite and the Shavit launch vehicle that puts them in orbit. The Military Aircraft Group is where IAI made its global name, as one of the pioneers of armed and reconnaissance drones. Its Heron and Heron TP medium and high-altitude UAVs are flown by air forces across Europe, Asia, and Israel itself. Its Harpy and Harop are loitering munitions, drones built to find and destroy enemy air defense radar on their own, a category IAI more or less invented and that other nations' militaries have since copied. Older systems like the Scout and Searcher established the export business decades ago and are still in service in some air forces. The fourth group, Aviation, is the least talked about outside Israel but is a real business in its own right.

It builds business jets in partnership with Gulfstream, most visibly doing final assembly and completions work on the G280, and it runs one of the world's larger passenger-to-freighter conversion operations, turning old Boeing 767s and 747s into cargo aircraft for airlines and logistics carriers. The same group does heavy maintenance, avionics upgrades, and aerostructure manufacturing for both military and civil customers, and historically built IAI's own aircraft designs like the Kfir fighter, the Arava utility transport, and the Lavi program that was canceled before production. IAI's own radar work also underpins parts of Israel's broader air defense network, including sensors that feed the country's short-range Iron Dome system, built by Rafael. With roughly 15,000 employees and a backlog that has grown sharply since 2023 amid heightened regional demand, IAI remains Israel's single largest defense exporter, selling across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America even as most of its home-market work stays classified.