U.S. Army orders more engines for Israel’s Eitan vehicle

The U.S. Army has added $39.1 million to a contract with Rolls-Royce Solutions America to build more engines for Israel’s Eitan armored vehicle, pushing the total value of that contract to roughly $158.9 million.

The modification, the eleventh change made to the original deal, will keep production running at the company’s plant in Graniteville, South Carolina, with the added work expected to wrap up by September 11, 2027.

There’s an interesting wrinkle in how this particular purchase is being paid for. The money comes from Foreign Military Sales funds that Congress set aside for Israel back in fiscal year 2010, money that never expired and is only now being spent on hardware. Foreign Military Sales work a bit like a government-to-government version of buying on credit: Washington approves a sale, funds get authorized, and then it can take years, sometimes many years, for a specific contract to actually draw down that money. In this case, funding approved 16 years ago is finally paying for engines rolling off a South Carolina production line in 2026.

This order builds on a much larger purchase Washington cleared in April 2025. That’s when the State Department approved a Foreign Military Sale to Israel covering additional Eitan engines and related support work, with an estimated total cost of $180 million. It came on top of an earlier $85.5 million sale that had been small enough to avoid the formal notification process Congress requires for larger arms deals. Rolls-Royce Solutions America, a Michigan-based subsidiary of the British engineering giant Rolls-Royce, was named the main contractor for that broader package, and it appears this week’s contract modification is one of the pieces being funded out of it.

For readers who know Rolls-Royce mainly from jet engines or luxury cars, it’s worth pointing out that the company’s defense engine business, which builds and services the powerplants inside vehicles like the Eitan, is a separate operation from its aerospace side. The engines themselves trace back to MTU, a well-known German engine maker that Rolls-Royce owns, and the specific model at the center of this contract is designated the 8V199TE21-D.

The Eitan itself is one of the newer additions to Israel’s ground forces. It’s an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, roughly 8 meters long and weighing somewhere between 30 and 35 tons depending on configuration, and it can carry up to a dozen soldiers including its three-person crew. Israel began developing it after the 2014 Gaza war exposed a gap in its vehicle fleet: the country’s existing armor was either too old, in the case of the decades-old M113 troop carriers still in service, or too heavy and slow for some missions, in the case of the much larger tracked Namer vehicle. The Eitan was meant to split the difference, offering wheels instead of tracks for speed and lower maintenance, while still carrying enough armor and an active protection system called Iron Fist to survive mines, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.

The first production Eitans reached Israeli units in May 2023, and by that November, only months later, the IDF had already rushed them into combat in Gaza following the October 7 attacks, ahead of their originally planned service date. Photos released by the Israeli military showed Eitans operating alongside Merkava tanks in built-up areas of the strip, and soldiers who used the vehicle in its first battles described it as fast to reach the front and tough enough to shrug off small-arms fire while breaking through fences and gates.

What isn’t clear from the public record is exactly how many engines the new $39.1 million order will produce, or what portion of the broader $180 million sale approved in 2025 has now been spent versus what still remains to be contracted. Those figures typically only become public if a future Pentagon announcement breaks them out, and for now, the Army and Rolls-Royce have kept the numbers to themselves.