A major foreign defense manufacturer has been operating in Charleston County for more than six months, but it has disclosed very little about the nature of its work since the facility first opened for business.
Elbit Systems America — a subsidiary of Israeli-owned Elbit Systems Inc., which has 10 sites in the U.S. mostly located on the East Coast — officially started operations in Ladson in May. As a whole, the company supplies up to 85% of land-based military equipment to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Elbit has recently seen growing demand from the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) for its “solutions,” according to a Dec. 18 press release. The company’s American subsidiary also offers products and services related to commercial aviation, homeland security monitoring and night vision technology.
The S.C. manufacturing facility stands at the end of Sightline Drive, a short road just off Ladson’s Palmetto Commerce Parkway. The building is buffered from the parkway by a line of trees, equipped with a traffic light. In other words, it doesn’t stand out as a defense manufacturing plant. And yet, Elbit’s Ground Combat Vehicle Assembly and Integration Center of Excellence is exactly what it sounds like — a plant that builds truck-mounted artillery systems and command post support vehicles.
Longtime Charlestonians might remember General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) — known before a buyout as Force Protection, Inc. — as a defense plant also in the Ladson-area industrial zone. The company, once a major Charleston manufacturer, supplied millions of dollars of contracted equipment to the U.S. Department of Defense and foreign armed forces, profiting from high demand for Iraq and Afghanistan war-era battlefield vehicles. GDLS spokesperson Robin Porter told the Charleston City Paper the plant was sold to Pegasus Steel, LLC., a company first established in South Africa in 1994.
Elbit America planned to invest approximately $31 million into its project, including construction costs, according to its Charleston County contract, which the City Paper obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Elbit’s facility uses 135,000 square feet of a 175,500-square-foot building. The remainder of the space is currently available for rent. The $31 million also accounted for machinery and site design, consisting of “36-foot cast-in-place, tilt walls … [and] 14 overhead cranes used to add armor to military vehicles,” wrote Choate Construction, the group contracted to build the plant.
Project Thunder comes to Charleston County
Charleston County first became involved in Elbit’s relocation project in 2019, when it entered negotiations with Elbit under the company’s requested code name, “Project Thunder.” Code names are a common statewide practice of assigning a made-up project name to keep relocation deals anonymous. Charleston County Council described Project Thunder as a “leading global source of innovative, technology-based systems for diverse defense, homeland security, and commercial applications.” Elbit America would use this name to “begin its tax incentives process.”
In September 2021, the S.C. Coordinating Council for Economic Development authorized Charleston County to use a $700,000 set-aside grant to assist Elbit in business operations. The county and the state’s Department of Commerce also created an “attractive package” for the project. Incentives included a fee in lieu of tax credits, known as a “FILOT,” and Special Source Revenue Credit (SSRC), two tax-lowering incentives regularly applied to major businesses.
The Elbit site qualified for FILOT, which is available to companies that invest at least $2.5 million. The FILOT can save 40% or more in property taxes. FILOT savings are even greater when, as applies to Elbit, a business is designated inside an industrial park.
The SSRC incentive is taken from FILOT revenue: Counties “award credits to taxpayers to be applied against their property taxes.” Essentially, companies get more tax credits from the tax credits they already have. Dollars saved provide a competitive advantage to relocated businesses, but at a price. A 2019 fiscal year report disclosed that companies’ extra revenue diverted $423 million from public schools across the state, disproportionately low-income schools with mostly Black and brown students.
Elbit publicly announced its 135,000-square-foot Ladson site in November 2021. Project Thunder was not revealed as Elbit until a March 2022 “public hearing prior to final action.” This was several months after the county’s economic development director had committed to granting the subsidiary tax incentives.
In earlier council discussions, county officials projected that Project Thunder would bring 302 full-time jobs to the area “during annual operation,” but Elbit America Communications Specialist Amy Hartley told the City Paper on Dec. 6 that the site had only around 50 full-time workers.
Discrepancies in reports, press releases
Hartley declined a City Paper request to tour Elbit’s Ladson plant “given heightened security concerns.” In recent weeks, there have been pro-Palestine demonstrations outside some of its locations. A security guard, however, said the South Carolina plant hasn’t had any recent issues.
Another statement from Hartley explicitly mentioned the site’s contract with the U.S. Army to manufacture Command Post Integrated Infrastructure trucks, despite recent press releases indicating that its main operation was fulfilling contracts from the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD) to build an automated vehicle mounted with an artillery system called a howitzer.
Elbit advertises the South Carolina-built howitzer vehicle as having “high firepower and long-range lethality.” The IDF reportedly has used the vehicle to launch white phosphorus artillery strikes in “densely populated areas of Gaza,” which Human Rights Watch says “violates the requirement under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian injury and loss of life.”
In March 2019, Elbit America received $125 million from IMOD to build “automatic self-propelled howitzer gun systems” for the IDF over a 12-year period, and the group secured a $200 million “further to” the 2019 contract one year later. In November 2023, Elbit announced that it was increasing deliveries to IMOD from various sites, including U.S. subsidiaries, to support the IDF’s invasion of Gaza.
That same month, a United States Field Artillery Association news release reported that, while the Ladson site is continuing production and delivery of U.S. Army vehicles, “Elbit America has recently started production of the Sigma-Next Generation Howitzer at their Charleston, South Carolina facility and will begin deliveries to the Israeli Defense Force in 2025.”
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