Merz Confirms Germany Will Buy and Station Tomahawk Cruise Missiles — Up to 400 Block Vb Reported, US Approval Committed for August

Merz made the confirmation in his government declaration on the Ankara summit: the purchase, he said, closes “an important strategic gap in our defence” while Germany works in parallel to develop European systems and station them in Europe. The letter of intent, signed on the summit's margins on 7 July, covers the missiles and their ground-based launcher, Lockheed Martin's Typhon — vertical-launch cells containerised onto trailers. The quantity is classified; reporting puts it at up to 400 Tomahawk Block Vb rounds worth more than USD 1 billion. The Block Vb reaches beyond 1,600 kilometres. The Bundeswehr's air-launched Taurus stops around 500, Britain fires its Tomahawks from submarines, and France's naval cruise missile reaches about 1,000 — no European state fields a ground-launched weapon in the class.

The purchase re-acquires, at German expense, a capability Washington once offered free. Under a 2024 agreement a US Army multi-domain task force with Tomahawks, SM-6 interceptors and developmental hypersonic weapons was to deploy to Germany from 2026 — American crews, American bill, aimed at the nuclear-capable Iskanders in Kaliningrad. The Pentagon walked away from the plan in May amid the Iran war. That war is also the queue Berlin now joins: by late-March reporting American forces had fired more than 850 Tomahawks at Iran — roughly nine times what the Pentagon buys in an average year — and no delivery date for Germany has been named.

The proprietary read. Between the offer Berlin lost and the purchase it signed, the missiles, the gap and the threat are unchanged; what moved is the price and the title. May taught Berlin that a stationed American missile is a posture decision Washington can reverse, while an owned one is German property under Bundestag authority. As Signal No. 100 argued, ownership converts the risk without removing it — the rounds join a depleted queue on an unnamed schedule, which is why Berlin is simultaneously reported ready to fund roughly half of Europe's new deep-strike coalition: so that this is the last American bridge it has to buy.