Before Lochem human planners struggled to synchronize fuel loads, munition types, and flight trajectories in real-time, often resulting in sequential rather than simultaneous strikes that allowed adversaries to react.
By Hezy Laing
The Lochem AI system, managed by the Matzpen unit within the IDF’s C4I and Cyber Defense Directorate, represents a paradigm shift in multi-theater aerial warfare, becoming fully operational during Operation Rising Lion in June 2025.
Prior to Lochem’s deployment, planning complex strike waves involving hundreds of aircraft, drones, and munitions across disparate fronts like Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza was a manual, fragmented process requiring days of coordination between intelligence units, the Air Force, and regional commands.
Human planners struggled to synchronize fuel loads, munition types, and flight trajectories in real-time, often resulting in sequential rather than simultaneous strikes that allowed adversaries to react.
The necessity for Lochem arose from the sheer volume of data generated by modern sensors and the critical need to compress the “kill chain” from days to minutes, a lesson starkly highlighted by the intelligence failures leading up to October 7, 2023.
Lochem improves warfare aspects by linking the target bank directly with available assets, including aircraft, fuel status, and ground forces, to automatically generate synchronized strike packages.
During the 2025 conflict with Iran, Lochem managed the planning for entire waves of attacks, coordinating hundreds of simultaneous trajectories for jets and unmanned aerial vehicles to overwhelm air defenses.
Where human teams previously took roughly 16 to 19 minutes to generate a single viable Course of Action (COA) with only a 48% viability rate, AI systems like Lochem can produce multiple validated options in under one minute, with viability rates exceeding 90%.
This speed allows the Israel Air Force to execute pre-planned programs rapidly and adapt to emergent targets almost instantly.
The system prevents friendly fire by maintaining a unified, real-time operational picture accessible to all command levels, ensuring that a division commander in the north and a pilot striking Tehran see identical data.
The history of Lochem is rooted in the decade-long development of the IDF’s “AI Factory,” which began with earlier systems like Habsora and Lavender used extensively in Gaza starting in 2023 to generate target lists.
While Habsora focused on intelligence processing and target generation, Lochem evolved as the command-and-control layer specifically for the Air Force, entering development around 2020 and maturing through 2024.
It was formally integrated into the reorganized C4I directorate in late 2025 under the new “Bina” (AI) division.
Unlike its predecessors which primarily identified targets, Lochem actively manages the logistics of destruction, calculating optimal flight paths and munition allocation dynamically.
This evolution from static target lists to dynamic trajectory management marks the transition from human-led planning assisted by computers to machine-led synchronization supervised by humans, fundamentally altering the tempo of modern air campaigns.
