Covenant Confirms Anthem Cruise-Missile Line at Leipzig From Early 2027, 1,000 a Year Designed for 5,000

The company's release ties the launch to a 105,000-square-foot plant in Dallas opened the same day, a 110,000-square-foot facility in Saxony and a smaller site in northern Israel. It lists an Other Transaction Agreement with the US Army for accelerated test and qualification, a contract worth about USD 70 million with the US Navy's Rapid Capabilities Office for a Maritime Anthem variant, and "certain customers" who restrict disclosure. Most parts are commercial off the shelf; the missile ships with the company's own mission-planning and command software for coordinated mass launch. The 5,000-a-year figure is attached to both the Texas and the Saxony plants.

For Germany the Reuters interview is the operative text. Kaufman put the Saxony supply chain at "no reliance on the U.S." with under five per cent of the bill of materials from outside Europe; first deliveries of the ground-launched missile are due early 2027; the range was not disclosed. hartpunkt notes that a German purchase below EUR 25 million would need no budget-committee submission, so an absence of one does not rule out a test quantity, and that observers read Marlow's appointment and the Leipzig site as evidence of a German buy the company will neither confirm nor deny. Ministry documents reported in August put long-range strike at about EUR 12 billion from 2027, subject to the Bundestag.

Leipzig is the fourth low-cost cruise-missile line announced in Germany and Poland this year, and the only one of the four without an established prime behind it. Rheinmetall and Destinus build Ruta at Unterlüß with first missiles targeted for the end of 2026; PGZ and Anduril announced Barracuda-500M at Bydgoszcz in July; Auterion Airlogix has Anubis in series production near Munich on its own account. Covenant's design figure of 5,000 for each of two plants stands against USD 150 million booked across every contract it has, which at a mid-six-figure unit price is a few hundred missiles: the capacity precedes the orders by an order of magnitude. Germany's Taurus stock is about 600 on Reuters' count; the question the site settles is where a German order would be built, not whether one exists. Signal No. 142 carries the confirmation beside the Bundestag's first reading of the 2027 defence estimate.