The next battlefield: IDF races to prepare for future wars in space, top general says - exclusive
MILITARY AFFAIRS: Brig.-Gen. Yael Grosman tells The Post why the IDF sees space as the next battlefield, while other IDF sources detail advances in AI, cyber, electronic warfare, and more.
By Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2026
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900566
Regarding the significance of space as the next great battlefield of war, she said, “There is a data revolution. We need to bring data and capabilities that the IDF needs everywhere, not just regarding the war that was, but the war that will be. This means we need to be organized differently.”
She explained that Israel understands it cannot compete on future battlefields without a robust approach to space that will fully cover all the worlds of data and content.
Referring to IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir’s mid-January five-year plan for the future of the IDF and its highlighting of space, Grosman stated, “The IDF chief said we cannot ignore space.
“We are receiving lots of energy and resources to pursue our interests in space since his declaration,” she continued.
While Israel began space-related programs around 45 years ago, Grosman noted, the country has come a long way in both satellite communications and satellite surveillance.
The Defense Ministry has supported her argument on this, announcing that it took over 12,000 photos of Iran during the 12-day June 2025 operation and over 50,000 photos during the 2026 Iran war.
According to Grosman, the new satellite communications technology has also been a huge part of how the air force can operate its fresh big data capabilities so far away from Israel’s borders.
In the future, she said Israel will need to and will be able to launch multiple payloads for satellites to hold and relay even larger data transfers, as well as new tasks in space.
With the Post noting that Russia, China, and Iran have all worked on ways to attack, damage, jam, or drag satellites in space, Grosman responded, “There are threats from space. We work with people who have a lot of power at the Defense Ministry and with the broader defense establishment. We can all bring forward achievements,” Grosman said.
She preferred not to address the question of having a separate new space command, which the US established in 2019. Rather, Grosman said that what was important was a mechanism to include all the different pieces of Israel’s space ecosystem.
This would ensure that, whether work is needed on communications, surveillance, the electromagnetic spectrum, attacking and defending satellites (more and more countries are working on this aspect), or new engineering techniques to increase satellite payloads, all efforts are maximized and coordinated.
Grosman also sees the future of space warfare as a major realm in which she has a significant hand in managing for the IDF.
Electromagnetic spectrum
In December 2025, the IDF reorganized its C4I and Cyber Defense Directorate, with a new AI-focused brigade and an expanded electronic warfare apparatus that enhanced the military’s defensive cyber capabilities, including against drone attacks.
Sfeira is the name of the new brigade responsible for electromagnetic spectrum issues, among other things.
According to sources, actions related to the spectrum are among the most underreported stories of the recent Iran war, with major implications in both Tehran and Lebanon.
Over the course of the June 2025 war with Iran, around 25% of 1,100 drones launched at Israel were taken out by the 5114th Spectrum Warfare Battalion, which operates electronic warfare capabilities, according to IDF officials.
Since the reorganization, for the first time, four out of five brigadier generals running full brigade-size units are women, of whom Grosman is the most senior as the top deputy to the head of Communications and Technology commander Maj.-Gen. Aviad Dagan.
Impact on Operation Roaring Lion
In the months leading up to February 28, the IDF was on close to a war footing when it came to Grosman’s Communications Command as it could be.
In many ways, even though around eight months passed between both events, Operation Roaring Lion was an extension or round two of the June 2025 war between the parties involved.
“We learned many lessons about fighting a war with Iran from Operation Rising Lion. We learned a new approach to utilizing military force, focusing on certain specific areas of warfare and information,” Grosman said.
“This allowed us to achieve dozens of percentages of new war-related solutions,” she explained, while keeping some of the classified lessons confidential.
Other top IDF officials told the Post that the air force had struck 2,600 critical targets in Iran’s defense industries during the 2026 war.
When the air force hunted such a monumental volume of targets, it relied on a digital platform that Grosman’s brigade had provided.
“We are building and operating the IDF’s information factory. The Communications Command already had a data center and databases. Now the air force, military intelligence, and the ground forces have their own databases under regulation and are using digital architecture, which will lead to increasing the IDF’s effectiveness and better use of the data,” Grosman said.
During Operations Rising Lion and Roaring Lion, Grosman’s brigade was able to collect and transfer (via communications platforms) substantial amounts of data over long distances such that “we made the third circle [of countries at a far distance] the same as the first circle [countries on Israel’s border].”
“There is no magic. You need satellites to provide communications, take pictures, relay data over thousands of kilometers, and record thousands of kilometers of footage,” she said.
“This requires creativity in areas like physics, in how to use electricity, and in other areas to make sure MAHA [the air force commander] can act in Iran as if it’s a first circle country ... We make sure that all of the arms of the IDF can take action where and when they want to,” Grosman noted.
But she warned that Iran had also adapted and was constantly making its own adjustments.
The power of AI in war and the need to keep adapting
This led to how rapidly the Communications Command facilitated data sharing over the last almost three years of war.
It was explained to the Post that this war was so dominated by the digital sphere in guiding the invasion maneuvers that it is hard to imagine future wars without these changes.
A major focus of the Communications Command going forward will be adapting to the expected challenges of AI, such as those anticipated for 2035, rather than limiting planning to the situation in 2026.
Combining major developments in cyber, AI, and quantum computing, the Communications Command views the world as entering an extreme period of radical change.
Asked how the IDF can be in a good place with AI, given that, more broadly in Israel, the consensus is that the Jewish state has fallen behind in AI and in building data centers in recent years, IDF officials emphasized the military’s unique capacities and context.
According to Grosman, the new AI brigade is evaluating all kinds of IDF technological needs, including data centers, software, and various operational models to deliver solutions on the front lines.
She noted that “Brig.-Gen. B” is the head of the AI brigade, handling service provision, infrastructure, modeling the IDF’s current uses and future needs, enhancing AI capabilities, and determining how best to employ data science.
Questioned about how the new division’s efforts with AI work clash with efforts in the civilian sector by the Artificial Intelligence Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, led by former Brig.-Gen. (res.) Erez Askal, IDF officials responded that where the parties can work together, they do, and where they need to keep their work separate, they stay separate.
Cybersecurity: The defense of one’s ‘crown jewels’
Next, the Post questioned IDF sources about whether the military is more challenged in an era when almost anyone can use AI to become a larger and more sophisticated cyber threat.
Grosman agreed with top commercial cybersecurity officials who say they invest significant resources in confronting cyber threats on the digital battlefield before hackers can reach their own cyber perimeters.
The Communications Command wants to know what is happening outside the digital perimeter in order to enable preemptive self-defense.
Expressly, it wants cyber warfare to be conducted in the enemy’s digital “territory,” rather than in Israel’s.
In that sense, internal digital-perimeter cyber defenses are only one element of a broader cyber defense strategy.
A common metaphor used by commercial cybersecurity experts in the past was to recommend fiercely defending a company’s technological “crown jewels,” even though that is now difficult to do.
Given the IDF’s unique technologies, it is likely to effectively defend a sort of “diamond crown jewel” from nation-state hackers.
Why did humanitarian aid fail?
In the field of humanitarian aid to civilians, the Communications Command said that all information assists with a variety of jobs.
These include distributing information, humanitarian concerns for both Israeli and Palestinian civilians, and efficiently distributing warnings to limit threats from Israel’s enemies.
IDF sources were pressed about July-August 2025, when top military officials themselves admitted a large-scale series of errors leading to serious food insecurity in parts of Gaza.
This food insecurity was so severe that Israel dropped its months-long limits on food and other aid items, which had been set to try to prevent Hamas from controlling that aid.
They were asked how this food insecurity came about and whether the IDF’s data was so accurate regarding humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Responding, the Communications Command said that the data cannot always be analyzed perfectly or applied exactly to the real world.
For example, if Hamas wants to seize humanitarian aid, algorithmic calculations about distributing food aid made back at an IDF base cannot prevent that.
But sources added that the IDF complies with whatever the government’s policy is regarding food aid or anything else.
The drone threat
Regarding the drone threat to the IDF, all activity detected by sensors is funneled into a digital data “factory,” the Post has learned.
Not all anti-drone solutions need to be kinetic, using huge amounts of firepower; softer, more cost-effective power is also available.
According to the Communications Command, combating drones is a complex area of warfare and defense that involves significant data sharing and communications.
Given that the IDF can weave together all sensor data, it can synergize such information.
After three years, the Post learned, the IDF had obtained substantial value from the massive amounts of data reviewed.
The information it has collected from the constant rounds of fighting has enabled the IDF to develop new tools for warfare and analysis.
Case in point, the data can be used to defend against regular drones, FPV drones, and cluster munitions, even though the military has acknowledged that there is not yet a comprehensive answer to combating FPV drones.
On the positive side, Grosman said that “one of the central reasons many soldiers are still alive has been the data collected using AI digital platforms” for analyzing enemy threat patterns, trajectories, and scenarios.
The army does not claim that it has a complete answer to the new FPV remotely, manually, and directly operated drone threat, something which could still take some months or years to solve.
One item that has been years in the making and which the Communications Command is in the process of completing, or may have just completed, is the move of many of its units to a new campus in the Beersheba area.
Portions of the command, other IDF units, and the Israel National Cyber Directorate have been relocating to the area on a rolling basis throughout the 2020s, but large additional moves are expected soon.
According to the Communications Command, the new location in the South will also enhance the IDF’s capabilities in various ways.
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