The most important sentence in the U.S.-Israel defense relationship this spring is not being spoken at the State Department or the Pentagon. It is being stamped on the bulkhead of a Tamir interceptor rolling off a new production line in Camden, Arkansas: Made in the USA.
Raytheon-Rafael Area Protection Systems (R2S), a joint venture between RTX's Raytheon business and Israel's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, officially opened its new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in East Camden at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in late November 2025. The facility represents a total investment of approximately $63 million. It will manufacture the Tamir missile — the interceptor used by Israel's Iron Dome Weapon System — and the SkyHunter® missile, which is the U.S. Marine Corps variant of the same weapon.
In a single industrial fact, the strategic character of the U.S.-Israel alliance has shifted. Iron Dome is no longer an Israeli system that the United States funds. It is an Israeli-American system that Americans build, for the defense of both countries.
The $1.25 Billion Contract
The opening of the Camden line was secured by the first production contract the R2S joint venture has ever received: a $1.25 billion award to supply Israel with Tamir surface-to-air missiles. Raytheon and Rafael both described the contract as a major milestone for the partnership and for the Israel Missile Defense Organization's (IMDO) plan to accelerate serial production of Iron Dome interceptors in the wake of the two-year multi-front war.
GovConWire's reporting on the deal emphasized the binational character of the program: the contract is not an American purchase of Israeli weapons for U.S. forces, nor an Israeli purchase of American-made components for Israeli weapons. It is a joint venture producing a shared weapon system on American soil, in volumes that neither country could efficiently produce alone.
The initial contract is sized to supply Israel through the acceleration phase that IMDO has openly said is required after the October 7-era depletion of its Tamir inventory. The second and third years of production, now that the line is stood up, will almost certainly serve both the Israeli inventory-replenishment requirement and a growing U.S. Marine Corps order book for SkyHunter — the short-range air defense missile that the Marines selected to fill a capability gap exposed by the post-October 7 threat environment.
Why This Is A Strategic Turning Point
For two decades, the U.S.-Israel defense industrial relationship has been characterized by a flow of American dollars into Israeli production. American Memoranda of Understanding, the Foreign Military Financing program, and specific Iron Dome co-development budgets have underwritten the defense that kept Israeli civilians alive. That flow will continue. But the Arkansas facility creates something new: an American-based, American-built stockpile of the interceptor itself.
Three strategic consequences follow.
First, the supply chain is hardened against a single-point-of-failure attack. A drone strike, a sabotage operation, or a cyber intrusion against a single Israeli production facility cannot take down the Tamir production pipeline if a second, independent line is fully operational in the continental United States. For a weapons system that has been cited as decisive in Israel's survival, that resilience is not a luxury. It is a strategic imperative.
Second, American jobs are now woven into the defense of Israel. The Camden facility is expected to create up to 60 new jobs in the near term, with expansion capacity for significantly more as the production contract scales. These are high-wage, high-skill defense manufacturing jobs in a region of Arkansas that has actively courted defense investment for a decade. Congressional support for the Iron Dome program now runs through the workforce of Camden, the political geography of the Arkansas delegation, and the interests of every subcontractor and supplier along the Tamir supply chain. That is how durable bipartisan support is built.
Third, the SkyHunter order book internalizes the logic. The Marine Corps' selection of the SkyHunter variant means that U.S. forces and Israeli forces are now fielding a common interceptor, with common logistics, common spares, and common software. That is the operational shape of an alliance — not two separate defense establishments that trade weapons, but one combined industrial base that produces a shared inventory.
The Broader Arrow Acceleration
The Camden line does not stand alone. It is part of a broader industrial acceleration that Israel announced this spring. Breaking Defense reported that Israel is ramping up production of its Arrow interceptors — the long-range ballistic missile defense layer that defends Israel from the Iranian class of threats — alongside the Tamir acceleration for the shorter-range Iron Dome layer. Arrow co-production, in turn, is an Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing joint undertaking, built on a Boeing facility in Huntsville, Alabama.
Place the two pins on a map. Camden, Arkansas produces Iron Dome's Tamir. Huntsville, Alabama produces Arrow. Together they form a crescent of American industrial geography that now depends, in part, on the defense of Israel.
Counter-Drone: The Third Layer
The other piece of the alliance's industrial acceleration is its counter-drone investment. The bipartisan United States-Israel Defense Partnership Act of 2025 — and its successor provisions in the FY26 NDAA highlighted in the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' NDAA resource guide — authorizes $150 million annually from 2026 through 2030 for a new United States-Israel Counter-Unmanned Systems Program. The program focuses on joint research, development, testing, and deployment of advanced counter-drone technologies. Those technologies are being built into a shared set of American and Israeli systems in the same jointly-produced spirit as Tamir and Arrow.
The January 16, 2026 U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, Research, and Critical Technologies extends the partnership into the AI layer that now sits on top of every modern defense system — from target discrimination to autonomous loitering munitions to the command-and-control software that coordinates multi-layered interception. That bilateral partnership statement binds the two countries' AI research ecosystems together in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago.
What the Alliance Means Now
Taken together, the Camden Tamir line, the Huntsville Arrow line, the counter-drone program, and the AI partnership describe a U.S.-Israel alliance that is no longer a matter of policy pronouncements. It is a fused industrial base. American workers are now producing the missiles that defend Tel Aviv. Israeli engineers are sharing the combat data that improves the missiles that defend U.S. Marines. The two countries' defense futures are, in material and measurable ways, a single future.
For the pro-Israel American audience, the Camden opening is the kind of story that does not always get the attention it deserves. There is no single dramatic moment — no state visit, no signing ceremony, no Rose Garden announcement. But the long-term strategic reality of the alliance is built out of exactly these ribbon-cuttings. The factory is the foreign policy. And the factory, this week, is running.
The Iron 100 includes legislators, governors, and defense executives who have spent their careers quietly advancing the kind of bilateral industrial integration that culminates in a facility like the one in Camden. Their work — hearing by hearing, contract by contract, weld by weld — is the reason the United States and Israel can now say, with literal truth, that the defense of both countries is Made in the USA.