A Billion Dollars and the Men Who Ran Israel’s Wars

The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies, financed through public stock markets, and traded like any other holding, and the firm that has carried the process furthest spent most of its life making radios for freight trains.

The shift is visible first in a component the size of a thumb. A fuze decides the instant a drone turns into a bomb: it holds the weapon inert through storage and flight and arms it only at the chosen second. An Israeli company called Gate Technologies, founded in 1996, builds these electronic fuzes, and its hardware is designed into more than ninety weapon systems, among them the loitering munitions that circle a battlefield until they dive into it. In September the fuze maker, with its Polish manufacturing partner, was bought for up to $390 million by a Nasdaq company called Ondas.

Two years ago Ondas sold radios to freight railroads. It reported $7.2 million in revenue for all of 2024, earned four hundred thousand dollars of gross profit on it, and had never turned a yearly profit in its life. Its shares changed hands for as little as fifty-five cents. In the eighteen months since, the same company has bought around twenty weapons firms for more than two billion dollars, reached a market value near four billion, installed a former director of the Mossad as the chairman of its defense arm, and moved to buy the software that aims Iron Dome. The change was bought, not earned.