Spiegel Puts the F127 Above EUR 40 Billion for Eight Ships — No Firm Offer, Says the Ministry; TKMS Disputes It

The reported jump is from roughly EUR 26 billion to more than EUR 40 billion, which Der Spiegel attributed to the American Aegis combat system and its SPY-6 sensor family — the package the State Department cleared as a Foreign Military Sale of up to USD 11.9 billion for eight shipsets in April. At current rates that notification is roughly EUR 10 billion; the reported increase is closer to EUR 14 billion, and the public record does not allocate the gap between the US package, the hulls and German integration. TKMS disputes only that the number matches the TKMS–Rheinmetall yard-cost split — narrower than disputing the total — while adding it could propose a smaller, reduced-capability frigate if Berlin's requirement changed.

Divided evenly, EUR 40 billion across eight hulls is more than EUR 5 billion each, but that is not a hull price: neither report states what the estimate contains, and the F127 has never had a Bundestag budget-committee vote to set a baseline against it. The ministry's "no firm offer" position means the sequence that would settle the number — a costed industry offer, then a Haushaltsausschuss submission — has not started. The USD 11.9 billion FMS clearance Großwald recorded in April is a ceiling on a cleared package, not a contract, and remains the only documented figure in the sequence.

A leaked estimate is not yet a price, and TKMS's rebuttal is narrower than it reads. Großwald's Signal No. 134 set this against the F126's cancellation two months earlier — six ships above EUR 18 billion, replaced by the MEKO A-200-based F128 at EUR 6.3 billion for four firm hulls — a precedent where a leaked overrun preceded a scope cut, not a bigger cheque. TKMS naming a smaller ship as its fallback, unprompted, in the statement calling the leak incomprehensible, reads as a hedge against that sequence repeating.