Berlin Plans a Four-Track Deep-Strike Mix — Typhon, Covenant Anthem, Flamingo, Bars — After the Tomahawk Halt

The plan, described in defence-ministry documents reported by POLITICO on 18 June, is Berlin's answer to a capability it had expected to lease from Washington. The 2024 Biden–Scholz agreement would have rotated US Typhon launchers firing Tomahawk and SM-6 through Germany from 2026; that deployment has now been cancelled amid the planned drawdown of roughly 5,000 US troops, US stock depletion after the Iran war, and friction between President Trump and Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Defence minister Boris Pistorius said in May the reversal had torn the capability gap back open.

The four tracks run on staggered timelines. The first buys the US Typhon launcher — already requested in July 2025, with up to 400 Tomahawk Block V rounds — for an initial capability in 2029. The fastest track aims to field low-cost cruise missiles by 2027, naming Fire Point's Flamingo FP-5 (a one-tonne warhead to about 3,000 km, roughly USD 500,000 a round against a Tomahawk's USD 3.6 million) and the Bars jet-powered drone-missile, both already used against Russia, alongside Israeli-American firm Covenant's Anthem, due to be tested in Israel this month with German officials invited. The remaining two tracks are longer-term projects with Britain: a high-end cruise missile by 2032 and a hypersonic glide vehicle by 2035.

Diehl Defence is in talks with Fire Point to build the Flamingo in Germany; chief executive Helmut Rauch has called domestic production realistic, though export rules remain the harder obstacle than the engineering. No system in the mix is yet under contract.

The proprietary read. The pattern is more telling than any one system: a leased US bridge — the cancelled Tomahawk rotation — replaced not by a single sovereign programme but by a hedge that mixes American hardware, battle-proven Ukrainian missiles and Anglo-German co-development across four timelines. Each track buys down a different risk — speed, range, cost, dependency — and the 2027 line leans hardest on Kyiv, the only supplier already firing at the targets Berlin would want to hold. A US strategic decision has cascaded straight into allied procurement, and the reach Germany now plans is one it intends to own. Detailed in Signal No. 86.