There’s something wrong when a military can pay for expensive weapons but can’t, or won’t, pay to train troops to use them.

Israel will spend almost $3 billion to buy just 19 American-made F-35 stealth fighters. At the same time, the Israel Defense Forces canceled training for IDF reservists for the remainder of 2014 owing to budget shortfalls.

Now it appears that the Defense Ministry might rescind the training cuts. The IDF signed off on the construction of 16,000 civilian apartments on a military section of a small airport, in return for a billion shekels from the Finance Ministry.

Leaving aside the question of how military preparedness has anything to do with real estate deal, it’s troubling that the IDF was willing to eliminate reserve training under any circumstance—especially with a civil war raging in neighboring Syria and what many Israelis see as inevitable conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Actually, it’s more than troubling. It’s downright foolish. A major reason for the dismal performance of Israeli ground troops in the 2006 Lebanon War was poor training.

Some tank crews, for example, barely knew how to operate their vehicles. They went up against Hezbollah, who had spent years rigorously training its fighters to defend against an Israeli offensive.