There are people who build programs, and there are people who build movements. Increasingly, those close to the Givati Brigade Association believe Jessica Zandani is doing the latter. As a Major Director of the Academy at the newly launched Givati Drone Center, Zandani is emerging as the driving force behind an initiative that could put Israel in a new kind of spotlight, one defined not just by military strength, but by the speed and originality of its innovation.
“What Jessica has built is unlike anything I’ve seen in this space,” said Itzhak Levit, Chairman of the Givati Brigade Association, who backed Zandani’s vision from the start. “She didn’t just design a training program. She designed a way of thinking, and that is a much harder thing to build.”
Zandani’s model reimagines what military drone training can be, merging live battlefield data, hands-on engineering, and rapid hardware development through 3D printing into a single, continuous learning system. Rather than treating training, maintenance, and innovation as separate tracks, Zandani built them to feed directly into one another.
A Different Kind of Leader
“I never wanted to build something that just teaches people how to operate a drone,” Zandani said. “I wanted to build something that teaches people how to think, how to solve problems the moment they appear, and how to build the next solution before anyone even asks for it.”
That philosophy is quickly becoming the identity of the Givati Drone Center itself. Where other programs rely on fixed curricula, Zandani’s approach evolves constantly, shaped by real feedback from the field and refined in real time by the very soldiers going through it.
“It doesn’t just teach about today, it reminds soldiers of yesterday and of the years before, so that we never make the same mistakes again,” Zandani said. “It gives the promise of ‘never again’ and means it. That’s not something you can put in a textbook. That’s something you have to build into the culture of the place.”