If these are Russian missiles then they are probably chipped as a safety precaution just in case they are ever used against Russian planes... I doubt the Russkies would ever give the info to Israel though :-(
Chipping is a way to add a safety kill switch to military hardware....just in case it has to be disabled or its performance degraded. Generally the hardware is chipped to be location aware or can be controlled by rf signals. The US probably does this with a lot of hardware...and we have the large NRO satellites with their massive antennas to send control signals to the gear.
“I doubt the Russkies would ever give the info to Israel though :-(”
If we (Israel) don’t have industrial spies in Russia, what the hell good is Mossad.
“ The US probably does this with a lot of hardware... “
Over 33 years, companies I worked for built a lot of FMS (foreign military sales) hardware. It was, for the most part, identical to what we built for our military. No chips. No hidden codes. Nothing to make our stuff better, or their stuff not work if we wanted it not to work. We only sell to people approved by the government; allies. You don’t do that sort of thing to allies.
Also, they’re not, for the most part, idiots. They’d figure it out and it would be a huge, huge diplomatic problem. The word would get out and NOBODY would by US hardware.
There’s nothing mysterious about the hardware. For the most part they get a full technical data package. They can go in and look at anything they want to. Believe me, you can’t get away with kill-switches.