Friendly Fire: What Merging With the IDF Will Actually Cost Western Soldiers.

We know about Five Eyes, now Congress is quietly looking to add a “Sixth Eye” with Israel. The IDF’s own casualty data shows exactly what that partnership will cost the soldiers standing next to it.

Here’s a prediction… It doesn’t require a crystal ball, inside information, or a particularly wild imagination. Just some simple maths and a bit of logical foresight. If America, the United Kingdom and Australia keep moving toward deeper military integration with Israel, personnel from all three of these countries will start dying in friendly fire incidents at a rate none of them are currently used to. Not because of bad luck. Because of documented, self-reported operational culture, and it’s worth working through exactly how documented before anyone dismisses this as my own hyperbole.

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The proposal nobody voted for.

We’ll begin with what’s actually on the table, because it’s much further along than most people outside defence policy circles realise. Buried in the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act is a provision, numbered Section 224 in that draft (reporting elsewhere refers to it as Section 219, suggesting the number has shifted between committee versions, which tells you something about how quickly and quietly this has been moving), that would tie the two countries’ militaries far closer together with weapons research, production and technology. It requires the Pentagon to appoint a single official, an “executive agent,” to coordinate joint research and development, shared weapons production, and the linking of military systems and data between the joined forces.

Netanyahu has been extremely blunt about this ambition. He wants to shift the relationship, in his own framing, from aid to partnership. A companion effort, the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, aims explicitly at pulling Israel into the National Technology and Industrial Base, the formal structural category currently reserved for exactly one club: the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Five Eyes.

Meanwhile a separate FY2027 intelligence bill would expand intelligence sharing between the US and Israel to a level critics say would exceed the Five Eyes arrangement itself.

One defence policy piece even gave the ambition a rather unimaginative name that should have been a joke and instead became a headline: the Sixth Eye. Though given the current friction between Washington and Ottawa, it’s worth asking whether Canada stays in the club at all. Swap one member for another and you’d still have five eyes, just not the same five. An eye for an eye, as it were, which feels like exactly the wrong idiom to be reaching for in a piece about military restraint.

Opponents in Congress, an unusual coalition running from libertarian-leaning Republicans to progressive Democrats, have pointed out that this level of integration was, until now, reserved for treaty allies who went through decades of vetting, industrial security review and public debate. Israel would get it without a treaty, without that process, and largely without the general public noticing.

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What “partnership” would actually mean on the ground.

When you strip away the acronyms and what’s being proposed is joint research, shared production lines, linked military data systems, and eventually, if the trajectory holds, integrated operations. That means American, British and Australian personnel working shoulder to shoulder with Israeli forces in training, testing, and potentially combat environments. Which raises an unglamorous but entirely fair question nobody in the NDAA markup seems to have asked: what happens when you put people from four different chains of command, four different training standards and four different rules of engagement into the same operational space?

The honest answer is you get people killed by their own side. That’s not my own conjecture. It’s the single most predictable output of coalition warfare, and it has a name: fratricide.

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America’s own scorecard isn’t great to begin with.

Before adding Israel to the mix, it’s worth being blunt about the baseline America brings to any coalition. During the Gulf War, friendly fire wasn’t a minimal footnote, it was a loud, brash headline statistic. Of the roughly 613 US battle casualties in that conflict, 35 killed and 72 wounded, around 17 percent overall, were hit by their own side, and a striking 77% of all US combat vehicles lost were destroyed by friendly fire rather than the enemy. That’s despite extensive pre-war training, rehearsals and cutting edge identification technology.

Britain and Australia’s records look different, though not in the tidy “better discipline” way it’s tempting to assume. In that same Gulf War, 9 of Britain’s 47 combat deaths, roughly 19%, were also friendly fire, a rate not far off America’s own. But the crucial detail is who was firing. British fatalities from friendly fire in that conflict, and in Iraq afterwards, were overwhelmingly the result of American fire landing on British positions, not British units killing each other. A 2007 UK parliamentary answer put the figure at 12 British personnel killed by US friendly fire in Iraq alone since 1990. It was the same story in Afghanistan, where 3 British soldiers died in 2007 after a US F-15 bombed their position during a firefight. So the British record isn’t one of superior internal discipline, so much as one of consistently absorbing American fuckups.

Australia’s picture is smaller in scale and harder to characterise with confidence. Of the 41 Australian personnel killed during the Afghanistan deployment, 34 are attributed to enemy action, with the rest split across accidents and other non-combat causes. There is no comparable public record of an Australian friendly fire crisis on anything like the scale documented for the US or, as the next section will show, Israel. I’ll be honest, there’s a genuine gap in the record here, maybe not proof of a flawless one, but it means the comparison that matters isn’t “who shoots straighter.” It’s what happens when a documented, self-reported, high-frequency shooter joins the group.

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The IDF’s own numbers, not a critic’s estimate.

This is the bit that should absolutely stop the conversation dead in its tracks, because it’s not an outside allegation. It’s the IDF’s own statistics. Of 170 Israeli soldiers killed during the early phase of the Gaza ground offensive from October 2023, 29 died from friendly fire and other accidents, including 18 from misidentification in airstrikes, tank shelling and gunfire. As the operation continued, the proportion held remarkably steady, hovering around 1 in 5 of all Israeli soldiers killed. The IDF’s own explanation cited the sheer density of forces operating in the same space, communication breakdowns between units, and exhausted soldiers failing to follow their own regulations.

That is hardly fog of war in the conventional sense. Soldiers who served there described something closer to policy. One soldier who spent months in a battalion command centre in Gaza told journalists there was, in his words, “total freedom of action”, where a mere feeling of threat was enough to justify shooting directly at a person’s centre of mass rather than firing a warning shot. An internal IDF report obtained by Israeli media in mid-2025 catalogued a two-week run of incidents that would of read like slapstick if the outcome weren’t fatal: a deputy company commander shot in the shoulder by his own unit, a Humvee collision injuring eight soldiers, an armoured vehicle veering off course and crashing into another. The same report separately noted multiple drones destroyed through what it called negligent handling and carelessness, and, in an unrelated incident logged in the same document, an accidental machine gun discharge from an engineering unit that a commander on the scene described as “pure delinquency”. Two different failures, same fortnight, same pattern of basic weapons discipline breaking down. The source who compiled the list warned bluntly that friendly fire reports were piling up across the force even in stretches with almost no enemy contact at all.

This isn’t a new pattern, and it hasn’t just been confined to Gaza. In 2022, a young staff sergeant was shot dead by his own comrade near Tulkarm, the third such incident that year involving Israeli forces killing their own. Around the same period, two Israeli commanders from an elite unit were killed by friendly fire at a West Bank base after being misidentified during a routine patrol, prompting condolences from then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. The pattern is consistent enough that Israeli military commentators themselves have started asking, in print, whether the IDF’s ground forces are simply less disciplined than the reputation suggests.

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And Israel’s trigger discipline problem isn’t limited to its own side.

If the concern were only that Israeli units are dangerous to themselves, that would be Israel’s own internal problem. But the historical record shows the risk also extends outward. As I, and many others keep reminding people, because remarkably this seems to keep getting forgotten, in June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a clearly marked, lightly armed American intelligence ship sailing in international waters. The assault killed 34 American sailors and wounded around 170 more, and by multiple survivor accounts the attacks continued against their life rafts after the crew had abandoned ship. Israel called it a case of mistaken identity (in ideal visibility conditions) and eventually paid compensation. Many American officials and survivors have never accepted that explanation. Speaking in Congress this June, on the incident’s anniversary, one representative noted plainly that eyewitnesses described the Israelis machine-gunning the lifeboats. Allies, indeed.

Whether you take the official account or the survivors’ account, the lesson for anyone weighing closer integration is the same. This is a military with a documented history of putting ordnance into an ally under circumstances that remain disputed six decades later, and a current, self-reported pattern of doing the same to its own troops on a rolling basis today.

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Escalation: what closer ties actually buy you.

Put all these threads together and the proposal in front of Congress right now stops looking like an “upgrade” and more like a wild liability with a flimsy worded press release tacked on the side. You’d be taking a force that already absorbs a meaningful share of its own casualties from friendly fire, embedding it more closely with a force whose soldiers openly describe permissive shoot-on-instinct doctrine as routine, and then calling the result a security enhancement.

It would be funny, if the people being put at risk weren’t going to be actual soldiers standing in the actual blast radius. Somewhere in the Pentagon there is presumably a memo written in crayon calling this “interoperability.” Interoperability is usually about whether your radios talk to each other. In this case it increasingly looking like it means finding out the hard way whose finger is on whose hot trigger.

There are a thousand reasons Western governments should be putting crater sized distance between themselves and Israel’s armed forces right now, far apart from just the casualty statistics. But even setting every one of those reasons aside and looking purely at the safety of the people who would be asked to serve alongside Israeli units, the case for closer integration crumbles quickly under its own numbers. A partnership like the one currently being pushed through Congress, with Israel applying considerable pressure to get it done, doesn’t make American, British or Australian personnel safer. It makes the person standing next to them measurably more dangerous to them.

It won’t take long, once this is operational, for personnel in those units to work out exactly what they got pushed into.

If you’re reading this in the US, UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand and this is the first you’re hearing that your government is quietly negotiating your country’s place in a five-decades-old intelligence and defence structure, now being reshaped around a sixth rogue member that nobody asked for, that’s worth sitting with. This isn’t a debate happening in the open. It’s happening in NDAA subsections and defence committee markups, this is exactly where things like this go when the people pushing them would rather you didn’t know.

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References:

Al Jazeera. “US Congress advances American-Israeli military integration plan.” 30 May 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/30/us-congress-advances-american-israeli-military-integration-plan

Al Jazeera. “Why was Israel spared scrutiny for the 1967 USS Liberty attack?” 8 June 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/8/why-was-israel-spared-scrutiny-for-the-1967-uss-liberty-attack

Al Jazeera. “Two Israeli officers killed in ‘friendly fire’ at West Bank base.” 13 January 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/13/two-israeli-officers-killed-in-friendly-fire-in-west-bank-base

Australian War Memorial. “Official Histories: Iraq, Afghanistan & East Timor.” https://www.awm.gov.au/learn/understanding-military-history/official-histories/iraq-afghanistan-timor

Fox News. “3 British Soldiers Killed by Friendly Fire in Afghanistan.” https://www.foxnews.com/story/3-british-soldiers-killed-by-friendly-fire-in-afghanistan

GlobalSecurity.org. “Colonel warns British troops on friendly fire.” https://gulfnews.com/uae/colonel-warns-british-troops-on-friendly-fire-1.343976

GV Wire. “Congress Advances Bill Expanding US-Israel Intelligence Sharing Beyond Five Eyes Framework.” 9 June 2026. https://gvwire.com/2026/06/09/congress-advances-bill-expanding-us-israel-intelligence-sharing-beyond-five-eyes-framework/

JFeed / i24NEWS. “IDF Battles Crisis of Friendly Fire and Operational Chaos in Gaza.” 11 June 2025. https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/idf-gaza-friendly-fire-crisis

Military.com. “Massie Revives Effort to Strip NDAA’s Section 219 Combining US-Israeli Defense.” 2026. https://www.military.com/massie-revives-effort-strip-ndaa-section-219-combining-us-israeli-defense

NBC News. “Nearly 1/5 of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza died because of friendly fire and other accidents, IDF says.” 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nearly-15-israeli-soldiers-killed-gaza-died-due-friendly-fire-accident-rcna129285

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Cooperation without Oversight: The United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” 16 June 2026. https://quincyinst.org/research/cooperation-without-oversight-the-united-states-israel-defense-technology-cooperation-initiative/

The Times of Israel. “IDF: Deaths of 29 of 170 soldiers in Gaza op were so-called friendly fire, accidents.” 1 January 2024. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-deaths-of-29-of-170-soldiers-in-gaza-op-were-so-called-friendly-fire-accidents/

USAWC Press. “Dealing Realistically With Fratricide.” US Army War College. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1757&context=parameters

Wikipedia. “List of Australian Defence Force casualties in Afghanistan.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Defence_Force_casualties_in_Afghanistan

Wikipedia. “United States-Israel FUTURES Act.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_Act

World Socialist Web Site. “Three British soldiers killed by US friendly fire in Afghanistan.” 27 August 2007. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/08/fire-a27.html

Ynetnews. “Continuous friendly fire incidents uncover decay of IDF’s ground forces.” 18 August 2022. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sj158115cq

+972 Magazine. “‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza.” 4 February 2026. https://www.972mag.com/israeli-soldiers-gaza-firing-regulations/

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Unique Reference Identifier | TD-2026-07-FiveEyesFriendlyFire-001

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