Boaz Levy is soft-spoken, almost understated—and yet nothing about his answers suggests hesitation. That contrast is part of what makes the head of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) so compelling: the quiet delivery masks a steady certainty about what his company builds, why it matters, and how quickly the world is changing around it.
When I sat with him at a recent Israeli-American Council event, he described IAI not as a single “defense company,” but as a multi-domain engine operating “from space, air, sea, land, and in between,” with systems that—during Israel’s most recent operation—were used to help forces “reach to the point of interest,” return safely, and protect civilians through ballistic-missile defense.
Levy said the company remains “100% government-owned,” but is now moving toward a minority initial public offering (IPO). He did not offer a business rationale for the move; instead, he framed it as a policy decision already taken. IAI will “always remain” government-owned, but “up to 49% of our stocks will be open to the public.” He added that the decision is now moving into implementation—“we are about to start the process”—with “many Israeli ministers” involved and a timetable that will take “as much as it should take” to keep “everything … under the supervision of the government.”
Much of the interview turned on a new and unsettling reality for Europe: rising instability and renewed fear of war on the continent, with countries racing to field defenses while threats from Russia—and other regional pressures—shape procurement decisions and alliances. Against that backdrop, Levy portrayed IAI as both a wartime backbone at home and a high-stakes supplier abroad, insisting that even under extreme pressure, the company’s approach is to deliver orders as promised.
His long history at IAI sits at the center of his worldview as he contemplates what comes next: autonomous platforms, artificial intelligence-driven decision support, layered defenses, and a future where technology takes on more of the battlefield’s burden while humans remain responsible for final authority.
Offering a compressed history lesson, he explained that IAI was founded “about 70 years ago” by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, who “understood that Israel requires technology in aeronautics.” The company’s remit, he stressed, expanded from aviation into a broad portfolio—“many, many regions of technologies”—so that today IAI builds across every domain.
That breadth is paired with scale. Levy noted that IAI has 16,000 employees and described the company’s engineering depth—“half of them are engineers, master’s degrees, and Ph.Ds.”
In a war-driven market, Levy framed reliability as a strategic asset. Even when demand spikes, he said, “whenever we are signing a contract, we are fulfilling it,” because customer confidence is central to IAI’s business model.
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Germany served as Levy’s clearest example of how IAI tried to balance wartime urgency at home with contractual commitments abroad. He said the company signed an Arrow deal with Germany “about a week before October 7,” before anyone could have anticipated how central that same system would soon become to Israel’s own defense. When the war began, Levy said IAI set two priorities: it would do “everything we can do and more to protect our nation,” and, at the same time, it would keep working for overseas customers at “the same magnitude of operation.” That approach, he said, allowed IAI to deliver to Germany “just on time,” deploy the system “in Berlin,” and declare “initial operational capability” only “just lately.”
Levy was direct about how defense exports work: in Israel, “all the export, the defense export, is being controlled by the government, by the Ministry of Defense,” and deals proceed only with the required licenses. Within that framework, he said, if a country approaches IAI and the company has the license, the dialogue can move toward a deal.
He showed little patience for ambiguity once a customer relationship exists. “Whenever we are signing a deal with a customer, no matter what, he is our customer,” he said, promising “100% of reliability and 100% of assurance that he will get whatever he receives on time.” The statement is as much about commerce as it is about geopolitics: Israel “knows who are its allies and who are with us and who are against us,” but the operational gate is the government’s export policy.
Levy argued that what people call “modern warfare” can’t be reduced to manned aircraft versus drones. “It’s not only the air force,” he said, calling Israel’s recent war “a very good demonstration for the future.”
He described a battlefield built around a single, fused data chain—one that starts with satellites used for “observation” and “communication” and ends with the same picture reaching every level of the force. In his vision, that information would flow all the way to “the last soldier in the field,” as well as to a pilot “in the cockpit” or a crew member “in a tank,” with decisions coordinated through centralized command and control. The point, he said, wasn’t technology for its own sake; it was to keep people alive: “Whenever we can save life and whenever we can send robots to do the work instead of soldiers, this is the best solution.”
Pressed to imagine 2050 and whether wars would be fought without people, Levy answered “Yes, but not as you imagine,” insisting the human role remains decisive even as systems become more autonomous. In his view, people stay in the loop as supervisors—the ones who set policy, authorize use, and intervene when conditions change. “But most of the work will be done by computers, by analysis that will be done through very sophisticated algorithms and AI, and will actually provide us the optimal solution for any case,” he said.
He also rejected the fantasy of perfect performance. “There is no 100% in any physical capability,” he said, which is why IAI thinks in “layers of activities,” so that if one layer fails, another can compensate. Even in a highly automated battlespace, he said, there will be “something like the Big Brother that will control everything.” At the same time, “the main work” is done by autonomous capabilities across drones, aircraft, tanks, and systems that will eventually be redesigned around the absence of onboard soldiers.
[2]Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy and The Media Line’s Felice Friedson at the Israeli-American Council event. (Courtesy)
Asked whether Israel could conduct a war without assistance from abroad in the form of military aid packages and other support, Levy argued that recent war experiences underlined a strategic lesson beyond technology: alliance structure matters. “Collaboration is the name of the game,” he said. “Nobody should go alone.”
He emphasized interoperability—shared communications, coordinated layers of operation, and planning that accounts for allied assets as part of a single campaign architecture. The message is pointed: going alone “is not such a good idea,” and winning requires tight coordination and continuous communication between all assets.
Turning to the topic of IAI sales abroad, and asked whether Israel targets countries rather than waiting to be approached, Levy framed it as straightforward business development. “It’s a marketing issue,” he said, adding that IAI is “working and marketing our activities all over the world.”
According to Levy, “Israel Aerospace Industries has unique capabilities that were demonstrated during combat, and the success of those capabilities can be used in other countries as well,” making IAI products both relevant and attractive to potential buyers. Still, the final hurdle remains political, with policy dictated by the Ministry of Defense taking some sales decisions out of IAI’s hands. “If the policy is negative, then we’re doing nothing,” he said.
IAI’s business, Levy noted, is overwhelmingly governmental: “about 80%” is defense, while “the other 20% is commercial aviation.” On the commercial side, he cited maintenance, repair, and overhaul services, and converting passenger aircraft into cargo aircraft. The emphasis remains on IAI’s core mission in national and allied security rather than retail-level products.
Levy framed Operation Rising Lion as a lesson in preparation and integration, not improvisation. He said the campaign underscored the need to prepare “way before,” to “analyze your enemy,” and to build a solution that functions as a true “system of system operation,” where communication is “essential for winning such a battle.” Just as important, he argued, was how the fight is managed: not as separate air, ground, and space efforts, but controlled “from above as a structure.”
What stayed with the public most, he predicted, was the scale of the ballistic missile salvos aimed at populated areas. Even with interceptions, “More than 90% of the incoming ballistic threats,” he said, the missiles that got through made the central point unavoidable: “Nobody expects a defense system to work 100%,” and “the damage is the outcome.” Seeing what “half a ton or a ton of explosives” can do in a single strike clarified why interceptor readiness—systems “like Arrow”—remains “essential for the protection of your population.”
Toward the end of the interview, Levy offered the kind of formative moment that explains his calm confidence in the face of the weight on his shoulders: “I started as an engineer in IAI 35 years ago,” he said. His career took shape when he joined the Arrow program. The challenge, he recalled, was answering the blunt question made famous by President Reagan: “Can you hit a bullet with a bullet?”
Searching for answers to that question—and the attempt to solve something “nobody else in the world did”—paved his way from engineer to manager to CEO, and continues to inform his decision-making and direction to this day, under extraordinary and continually evolving pressures.