Israel’s defense modernization is increasingly being built around artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and electronic warfare, while the people most exposed to the fallout are workers, young jobseekers and anyone caught in the machinery of high-tech militarization. Companies and governments are moving to integrate AI into military networks, improve sensing and adapt to drone and GPS threats, and the result is a tighter fusion of corporate power, state force and automated control.
Who Has the Power
Tenna Systems, which raised $13.5 million in February 2026, is turning existing sensors including phones, aircraft and satellites into a live electromagnetic detector. The company describes its platform as “AccuWeather for electronic warfare.” That is the language of a system that wants to map, predict and dominate the air around people, not serve them. R2 Wireless uses passive RF sensing to detect, classify and geolocate wireless signals without emitting any signals, and it is already deployed with NATO forces. It also won the US Army’s xTech competition in the counter-UAS category.
The latest generation of drones is also being reshaped for this battlefield. According to the base article, these drones increasingly rely on vision-based navigation using onboard cameras and AI so they can operate without GPS. In other words, the war machine is adapting to keep functioning even when the usual signals are unavailable, with machine vision and autonomous systems taking over more of the work once done by human operators.
Israel approved a plan to buy F-35 and F-15IA fighter jets from Lockheed and Boeing, a move described as enabling a technological leap in integrating autonomous flight capabilities, next-generation defense systems and space-domain competencies. The upgrade is presented as modernization, but the practical meaning is more capacity for the military apparatus to extend its reach and refine its control.
The AI-First Military Apparatus
The US Department of Defense announced partnerships with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to create an “AI-first” approach to the armed forces. The stated aim is to streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding and augment warfighter decision-making at high security levels, including IL6 and IL7. The Pentagon said its GenAI.mil platform has over 1.3 million department users and has generated tens of millions of prompts and deployed hundreds of thousands of agents in its first five months.
That is not a side project. It is a sprawling institutional push to automate military judgment, speed up command systems and deepen dependence on corporate technology firms. The language of “situational understanding” and “decision-making” masks a simple fact: the armed forces are being wired into a more efficient machine for managing violence.
Who Gets Crushed
The costs are not distributed evenly. In Israel’s domestic labor market, AI and robotics are changing employment patterns. A Taub Center study by Michael Debowy, Prof. Gil Epstein and Prof. Avi Weiss found that AI’s impact on overall unemployment remains limited, but it is changing who becomes unemployed, with the effect concentrated in occupations that previously had strong demand, low layoff rates and persistent vacancies.
Epstein said: “The era of hi-tech workers’ immunity is over. Our data shows that AI is ripping the cards. It explains about a fifth of the increase in programmer unemployment and locks the door mainly on young people. While veteran staffers become more efficient with the help of the machine, the ‘juniors’ are the first to pay the price. Those who wait for a change and don’t rush to upgrade their skills here and now will simply be left behind.”
Weiss said: “We see here a process in which technology is not only replacing working hands but is completely changing the rules of the game. The meaning for the unemployed is that competition for existing jobs is becoming much tougher, and those who don’t adapt their skills to the AI era may find themselves pushed out. At the policy level, the state must already activate assistance systems for the newly unemployed and design programs for them to provide them with skills complementary to artificial intelligence to enable them to reintegrate into the changing labor market.”
The researchers said AI explains between two percent and six percent of the change in the occupational distribution of the unemployed. They found that between 2019 and 2022, workers in occupations at high risk of displacement by AI accounted for 14% to 16% of all Israeli unemployed, while by 2025 their share had risen to 20% to 25%.
Among software developers, AI accounts for between 12% and 20% of the increase in unemployment recorded between 2022 and 2024 and 2025; among sales representatives, it explains between 10% and 26% of the increase. Debowy said robots push people into unemployment more slowly than generative AI because of the high cost of implementation, but that they still have an impact, adding that in Israel traditional local manufacturing has needed fewer hands because of robots and that a third of such workers have been replaced in recent years. He also said public service reacts more slowly because it depends on political decisions rather than market forces.
The Reform Trap
The study also said AI enables experienced and highly skilled workers to become significantly more productive, potentially shifting demand away from those at the beginning of their careers, and cited US evidence of a 13% decline in employment among young workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations at risk of automation while more experienced workers were largely unaffected. The researchers said the trend is also shaped by structural factors including the slowdown in the hi-tech sector, the growing share of digital-age occupations at risk of automation among both the employed and the unemployed, and the partial regression from structural changes brought about by the COVID-19 crisis.
They said unemployment has not risen in the AI era, but the composition of the unemployed has shifted, and that AI already explains between two percent and six percent of the change in the occupational distribution of the unemployed. The state’s answer, as described by Weiss, is to activate assistance systems and design retraining programs. But the same institutions driving militarization and automation are the ones expected to patch over the damage after the fact, leaving workers to absorb the shock while the apparatus keeps expanding.