Rafael Advanced Defense Systems announced on September 15, 2026, at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference that its SPICE 1000 air-to-surface munition is being integrated onto the F-35 for the first time. The work is a joint project with Lockheed Martin, carried out at Lockheed’s facilities in the United States, and it will initially clear the weapon for Israel’s F-35I Adir fleet before Rafael opens the door to other F-35 operators worldwide.
The announcement is a fairly quiet piece of news to describe a genuinely difficult engineering problem. Fitting an existing precision-guided bomb onto the world’s most widely fielded stealth fighter is never a simple bolt-on job, and the specifics of this integration explain why.
What SPICE 1000 Actually Is
SPICE, short for Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective, is not a standalone bomb but a guidance kit that Rafael straps onto existing 1,000-pound-class bomb bodies, converting them into precision stand-off weapons. The kit navigates toward its target area using inertial navigation combined with GPS, then switches to an electro-optical seeker for the terminal phase, comparing what the seeker actually sees against pre-loaded reference imagery of the target through scene-matching algorithms. That comparison lets the weapon correct its own course based on genuine visual recognition of the target scene rather than satellite positioning alone, which is precisely why SPICE remains effective even when an adversary is actively jamming GPS signals, a scenario Rafael and most modern militaries now treat as a routine feature of contested airspace rather than an edge case.
Rafael rates SPICE 1000 for strikes at ranges beyond 120 kilometers with a circular error probable of less than 3 meters, figures that place it firmly in the stand-off precision-strike category rather than a close air support weapon. The SPICE family spans three weight classes in total, and Rafael has already partnered with Lockheed Martin on the smaller SPICE 250 variant, which the companies agreed in 2021 to jointly develop for sale in the United States and Poland, building on an original 2019 teaming agreement to co-develop, market, and manufacture SPICE guidance kits more broadly. Yuval Miller, executive vice president and general manager of Rafael’s Air and C4ISR Division, described that original agreement as setting the stage for the two companies “to provide unmatched mid-range guided air-to-surface weapon systems to enhance mission flexibility and success.” The SPICE 1000 integration on the F-35 extends that same partnership to the largest weapon in the family.
A Battle-Tested Weapon, Not a New One
None of this is unproven technology. SPICE 1000 has been operational with the Israeli Air Force since 2017 and has served as a primary munition flown from Israel’s F-15 and F-16 fleets for long-range strikes, alongside export sales to a number of other air forces. The weapon’s operational record includes strikes in Yemen, reportedly used against explosive-laden remote-controlled boats moored in coastal harbors, and both SPICE 1000 and its smaller SPICE 250 sibling were employed in Israel’s long-range strike campaigns against Iran during Operation Rising Lion in 2025 and Operation Roaring Lion in 2026. The Israeli Air Force has released footage from some of those strikes, including video recorded from the munition’s own camera in the moments before impact.
What is new is not the weapon itself but the aircraft carrying it, and that distinction is the entire reason this integration warrants its own announcement rather than folding quietly into routine munitions news.
Why Putting SPICE on a Stealth Fighter Is Genuinely Hard
The F-35 is built around low observability, and preserving that low radar signature means the aircraft carries the overwhelming majority of its weapons load inside internal bays rather than on external pylons, since anything hung outside the airframe dramatically increases the aircraft’s radar cross-section and erases much of the stealth advantage the platform exists to provide. Reporting on the integration confirms SPICE 1000 will be carried internally, which means Rafael and Lockheed Martin are not simply confirming the bomb physically fits under a wing. They are qualifying it for release from a confined internal bay, verifying separation characteristics at operationally relevant speeds and angles, and ensuring the weapon’s own electro-optical seeker can acquire and track its target reliably once released from that constrained carriage position, all without compromising the aircraft’s signature in the process.
The timing lines up with a broader hardware transition already underway in Israel’s F-35 fleet. Three Israeli F-35s equipped with Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) hardware arrived in January 2026, an overhaul of the aircraft’s core computing infrastructure that functions as a stopgap ahead of the more capable Block 4 upgrade, which is expected to add longer-range target detection and identification along with more advanced electronic warfare capabilities. The SPICE 1000 integration is being carried out specifically on this TR-3 baseline. Notably, the U.S. Department of War’s own FY2027 F-35 Modernized Selected Acquisition Report, dated April 21, 2026 and cleared for public release in August, had already disclosed a version of this effort in less detail, describing progress on the Israel-unique SPICE 1000B variant and referencing a strategy to accelerate implementation through a process the report calls “SPICE Lite,” though neither Rafael nor the Pentagon has publicly detailed what that streamlined approach actually involves.
Rafael and Lockheed Martin expect the integration work to take several months before the weapon is formally cleared for operational use on Israeli F-35I aircraft.
Beyond Israel
Rafael has been explicit that Israel is the starting point rather than the destination. The company has stated that once the Israeli integration is complete, F-35 operators worldwide will be able to field SPICE 1000 as well, a meaningful prospect given that twenty countries currently operate the F-35 and Israel itself, the first nation to fly the aircraft in combat back in 2018, has recently ordered 25 more F-35s to bring its own fleet to 75 aircraft.
That trajectory fits a wider pattern of allied nations expanding what their own F-35 fleets can actually carry, rather than relying solely on the aircraft’s original weapons list. Other F-35 operators have pursued comparable integration efforts with different munitions built around the same stealth-carriage constraints, and Rafael and Lockheed’s work here sits alongside a broader wave of precision-strike development Future Military Technologies has tracked from Lockheed Martin specifically, spanning everything from next-generation hypersonic glide bodies to the JAGM missile’s new life as an AI-cued counter-drone interceptor. SPICE 1000’s arrival on the F-35 is a smaller story than either of those, but it reflects the same underlying logic: extending a combat-proven weapon onto a new platform is often a faster and lower-risk path to new capability than developing something from scratch, provided the integration work, however unglamorous, actually gets done.
A weapon that has already proven itself in combat
There is nothing flashy about a guidance kit strapped to a 1,000-pound bomb finally being cleared for a new aircraft, and Rafael’s own announcement reads more like a status update than a breakthrough. But the substance underneath that quiet framing is real. A weapon that has already proven itself in combat over Yemen and Iran is being adapted to fit inside the internal bay of the world’s most widely exported stealth fighter, work that requires solving separation, signature, and seeker-performance problems that a non-stealth integration would never have to face. If Rafael’s own roadmap holds and the capability does eventually extend to F-35 operators beyond Israel, this quiet integration effort in a Lockheed Martin facility this year could end up shaping the strike options available to a meaningful share of the F-35’s twenty-nation user base.
