Who Has the Power
Matzpen, the IDF unit most responsible for integrating and relaying artificial intelligence and “big data” intelligence across the military, played a critical role in transforming the air force’s effectiveness during the recent war with Iran, its commander, Col. Rotem Beshi, told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview. The picture Beshi draws is not of some neutral technical upgrade, but of a military apparatus becoming faster, denser and more centralized in how it finds targets, plans attacks and pushes data through the chain of command.
A new system managed by Matzpen, known as the LOCHEM system, handled all the planning for attacks on Iran, starting with working with the air force’s special, relatively new Iran unit, said Beshi, 38. Beshi said Matzpen’s digital applications and processes helped decide priorities and helped integrate the planning of whole waves of attacks. He said gathering certain data to make operational decisions, which used to take days, can be done in hours, or in some cases, minutes, and that Matzpen is pushing to get nearly all the processes that connect to emergent situations down to minutes.
Part of this process was sped up by the formation of a brigade-sized IDF unit, announced in December, to address the spread of artificial intelligence use across the military, including the Matzpen unit. All of these units are part of the Communications and Cyber Defense Command, headed by Maj.-Gen. Aviad Dagan. Matzpen could be working on a couple of dozen new applications at a time to improve the military’s offensive and defensive capacities.
The Machinery of War
Beshi said that if in the recent past, developing complex new applications to confront new challenges took months or years, now the military develops new programs much more rapidly. He said his goal is for IDF field commanders to feel they are dealing with a familiar, user-friendly technological world that empowers them to better carry out the war’s strategy and tactics, rather than technologies that are confusing to use and slow them down.
Beshi, who has two degrees in computer science, a master’s degree in technology and systems management, and a certification as a chief data officer from MIT, said data is transmitted across all major commands, including the northern, southern and central commands. He said this significantly helps planning and fundamentally alters military processes. Beshi, who for around 20 years served in various roles in the Communications Command, including what was once known as the LOTEM Brigade, which has now been absorbed into the new AI-focused brigade, said the IDF Spokesman credited his work with being integral to all of the military’s major successes during the recent war. In 2017, Beshi was selected by Forbes magazine for its 30 Under 30 list.
Beshi said Matzpen’s tight integration with operational and intelligence processes allows the intelligence process to find a target, then move to operational processes and then to concrete planning, approval and the actual attack, followed by the BDA, or battle damage assessment, process. He said Matzpen’s role is to connect the intelligence and the operations, sending data into and out from field operations closest to the front. He said this could lead to different Matzpen data processes for the air force targeting Iranian ballistic missile threats versus its targeting the IRGC and Basij forces used to oppress domestic Iranian protesters, though how it was done was kept classified.
Warnings, Targets and Civilian Control
He said it also allows the air force and IDF intelligence to integrate targets much more effectively and faster into the overall targeting plan. During the war, which played out on both the Iranian and Lebanese fronts, Beshi said Matzpen’s creative, cutting-edge data streaming facilitated quickly changing plans and maximized operational flexibility. He said this could include influencing the trajectory of an aircraft so as to focus on certain targets more than others, keeping attacks streaming more fluidly for specific targets.
Beshi said that to fully exploit the data, there was a joint picture with the US. He said that during the Iran war, the impact of air force attacks on Iran and of Israel’s vast number of sensors and surveillance relaying data via Matzpen to the IDF Home Front Command helped it prepare and issue much faster warnings. This allowed the command to plan much more in advance and to make more life-saving or routine protective adjustments in real time.
Beshi said that in the months between the June 2025 Iran war and the 2026 war, the IDF Home Front, working with Matzpen, overhauled many processes for establishing the coordinates of an Iranian attack and for getting that data interactively to the police, Magen David Adom and the broader civilian population. He said these new Matzpen data processes empowered the IDF to know where all Home Front Command forces are, to best direct them to the ideal spot. Another Matzpen application, which Beshi referred to as “Binah” (insight), coordinated the positioning and capacities of all local village security teams and their commanding security coordinator.
Matzpen has also performed joint big data AI research with IDF Intelligence, the air force and the home front district units to make it possible to reduce the size of the potential target elliptical area within Israel, referred to as “the polygon,” which needed to receive warnings, Beshi noted. He said this made warnings and responses more focused, reducing the disruption of everyday life routines from receiving a missile warning to more specific residential areas. For example, initial warnings at the start of the war for a potential Iranian ballistic missile hit covered a polygon of two million people, but eventually this was reduced to 900,000 people, and, in some cases, even fewer.
Besides the home front, Matzpen helps with the process of conveying warnings to IDF forces invading and otherwise maneuvering within southern Lebanon. Beshi said there are tons of sensors to analyze the potential of very diverse threats, including rockets, anti-tank missiles and low-flying drones, and that other threats were not by sensors but by analyzing video footage of threats taken by human beings. In Lebanon, as with Iran, Matzpen’s partnership with the air force has been very important. Combined with ground force sensors, Matzpen has painted an incredibly detailed real-time threat picture for the Northern Command to respond to and shape.
Beshi said Matzpen has used highly complex algorithms to increase its ability to give targeted warnings only to the clearly targeted IDF forces in a specific locality of southern Lebanon so as not to disrupt the operations and progress of other military forces. Recently, Matzpen added new digital infrastructure to expand its capacity to issue certain warnings on radio frequencies. Matzpen has also improved at dissecting multiple diverse geographic threats and issuing different kinds of warnings for them, such as when Iran and Hezbollah both attacked portions of northern Israel with different kinds of weapons at the same time. Beshi said the data they relay in such instances is robust and at very high quality and scale. He said Matzpen is always seeking to add more sensors, devices, applications and digital infrastructure to maximize the IDF’s broader capabilities.
Beshi gave an example in late March when a Hezbollah fighter fired an anti-tank missile toward IDF troops in southern Lebanon and, via a Matzpen application, those forces were warned within two seconds of the impending threat, giving them enough time to get to a protected stance and resulting in no harm to those forces.
Data as the Battlefield
Matzpen’s program, MAPIT, works with satellites, including with IDF Unit 9900, which handles satellite information, and part of its work was acknowledged during the war, when, on March 16, a senior 9900 official made a public statement following strikes against Iran’s satellite launch center and its center for attacking other countries’ satellites. MAPIT is part of the IDF’s apparatus for the intake of operational geographic media and sharing that data with different defense establishment entities. It integrates AI and moves information that has been received onto a digital map.
Beshi said that if a report comes in about a threat to Beersheba or Haifa, MAPIT takes the data or the text, such as a video of a ballistic missile with a large impact destruction area, categorizes where the data is from and then pulls it up on a digital map. He said it has huge data capacities, which multiply the use of big data power, and that being connected is the story. He said Matzpen’s big data and programming abilities have also helped reduce friendly fire incidents. He said Matzpen’s applications already help map out friendly forces so precisely that, while accidents still happen, usually it is not because soldiers did not know where other units were located. Instead, he said, friendly fire incidents have occurred more often where soldiers are pinned down so badly that they lack the time and space to physically interface properly with the available data.
Beshi said the IDF is in the process of a major revitalization of its management of AI, data and media for operations. He said the military receives and absorbs operational reports from around the world, on every front, including open source data, to build a platform that serves as a mosaic of information. He said the IDF understood, like any large business or entity, what the value is of its data, and that the value of AI and big data, if the data is closed off and inaccessible to groups of people who might need it, compared to different kinds of data storage clouds, can change and directly impact the real-world military front lines.
Beshi said that in recent months, Matzpen has been even more at the center of gravity of the IDF’s operations. He said Matzpen is different from any other data manager in the IDF, as it operates across all lines and arms of the military, whereas each military arm also has its own smaller data managers who focus on specific needs, such as the air force or the navy. Beshi concluded that Matzpen increases the value of data for the IDF.