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The Defense and Tech Podcast

The Defense and Tech Podcast

By: Jerusalem Post Podcasts
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Hosted by Anna Ahronheim, The Defense and Tech Podcast from The Jerusalem Post dives into the intersection of security, innovation, and strategy in Israel and beyond. Each episode brings you in-depth conversations with military experts, tech leaders, and policymakers shaping the future of defense. From battlefield technology and cybersecurity to innovation startups and regional threats, we explore how Israel’s defense and tech ecosystems are changing the modern world.Copyright Jerusalem Post Podcasts
Episodes
  • Why does Europe buy Ukraine's drones, not Israel's? | Michael Cukierman

    Why does Europe buy Ukraine's drones, not Israel's? | Michael Cukierman
    27 Sep 2026
    From commanding an IDF electronic-warfare unit to brokering defense-tech M&A, Michael Cukierman explains the $1 billion drone threat that no jammer can stop.

    In this episode of The Defense and Tech Podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Michael Cukierman, Partner and Head of the Defense Division at Cukierman & Co. Investment House, for a rare view from both the battlefield and the boardroom. Cukierman traces how the drone threat mutated in real time: from commercial quadcopters bought off eBay and Amazon, to 3D-printed DIY drones, to today's fiber-optic drones that carry no RF signal to jam. "The threats in the battlefield change on a monthly basis," he says, and each shift opens a new race for a solution: "There is a $1 billion race to find the solution," and this time it has to be kinetic.

    He also breaks down the layered logic of counter-drone defense, detection, identification, decision, interception, and the layer he thinks companies keep underestimating: command and control. Then the conversation turns to money and markets: why European buyers still look to Ukraine over Israel, how an Israeli firm went head-to-head with a Ukrainian company in a Rheinmetall tender, why manufacturing (not technology) is the real bottleneck to scaling, and how defense sensors end up as medical hearing aids. Looking to 2030, Cukierman argues the front line will be largely automated, with human operators pushed to the rear.

    What makes this interview different is the dual vantage point: Cukierman has operated counter-drone systems in the field and now advises on the deals that take them global as part of the M&A Worldwide alliance. For anyone tracking defense-tech investment, the drone-vs-counter-drone arms race, or Israel's place in a shifting global market, it's a grounded, jargon-tested read on where the money and the threats are heading next.
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    33 min
  • Europe criticizes Israel in public, buys its tech in private

    Europe criticizes Israel in public, buys its tech in private
    13 Aug 2026
    European governments condemn Israel publicly while their purchase orders arrive quietly, says IL Ventures co-founder Yoni Heilbronn, and interests, not politics, now decide everything.

    Heilbronn, who built automotive cybersecurity pioneer Argus before launching IL Ventures in 2021, argues the post-World War II order is finished. "Globalization as we knew it is pretty much dead," he tells the Jerusalem Post's Anna Ahronheim, describing a world of "real politik to the extreme" where geopolitical shocks hit corporate balance sheets within days rather than years. The consequence he thinks leaders underestimate: supply chains have not just shortened, they have fractured, and every country is now solving for itself.

    That fracture is where Israeli technology comes in, and where Heilbronn is unusually candid about the limits. He is openly skeptical that the defense tech gold rush suits venture capital at all, citing sales cycles and a thin field of acquirers. He explains Pax Silica, the US-led semiconductor alliance that placed Israel and Qatar under the same framework, and why he thinks Brazil, Mexico, and Southeast Asia matter more to Israeli startups right now than the well-worn road to Silicon Valley. He also tells the story of hacking into a global carmaker's internal network from a Tel Aviv office, using nothing but a component removed from a car.

    Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.
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    43 min
  • 'We fought Hamas and fed Hamas at the same time' | IDF general

    'We fought Hamas and fed Hamas at the same time' | IDF general
    2 Aug 2026
    Israel is winning on every front, and Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winner says the next war is already being armed inside Israel's own borders. In his first weeks as chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF–HaBithonistim), Winner sits down with Anna Ahronheim to argue that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have all been militarily defeated, and that the threat Israel is least prepared for is domestic: smuggled illegal weapons, organized crime in Arab society, and an armed Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria that could turn its guns the day Mahmoud Abbas dies.

    On Gaza, the former head of Southern Command operational planning is blunt about why the war dragged on: "The failure of not ending this war long ago is a military failure." Israel, he says, spent 2024 fighting Hamas with one hand and feeding it with the other. Winner spent over a decade drawing the IDF's operational plans in the Southern Command, from Protective Edge through the current war, which makes his critique unusually specific.

    He calls the Lebanon agreement a genius move, the first time an Arab state has signed with Israel and gotten no territory in return, warns that Turkey, not Iran, is the long-term rival in a contest over the India–Middle East–Europe corridor, and diagnoses what he calls the "unprofessional professionalism" of an army whose officers rotate every two years and let industry decide what it buys.

    He closes with rapid-fire answers on Israel's biggest blind spot, the one mistake it keeps repeating in Gaza, and the single reform he'd make to national security decision-making tomorrow.

    Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig, Lara Sukster Mosheyof, and Shifra Jacobs.
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    46 min
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