Raytheon Wins a Seven-Year, USD 22.9 Billion Tomahawk Contract to Reach 1,000 a Year — Berlin Still Unapproved
Tucson, 17 August 2026
Key points
- The US Navy awarded Raytheon a USD 22.9 billion, seven-year contract for Tomahawk cruise missiles on 17 August, under the Department of War's Arsenal of Freedom initiative
- Raytheon's statement says the award "supports the annual production ramp to more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles and associated support, ensuring a stable, predictable supply for the Navy and allies"; the company currently builds about 60 a year
- It firms up the framework agreements Raytheon and the Department signed in February; RTX says it delivered three times as many Tomahawks in the first half of 2026 as in the first half of 2025
- Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao: "We called on industry to rapidly scale up munitions output, and RTX is delivering." Neither the Navy nor Raytheon published a year-by-year schedule or an allocation between US and allied buyers
- Germany's Tomahawk purchase — a July letter of intent under which Washington committed to export approval in August, reported at up to 400 Block Vb rounds for Typhon launchers — had no approval and no DSCA notification on the record as of 18 August
Raytheon received a USD 22.9 billion, seven-year US Navy contract on 17 August to take Tomahawk output from about 60 missiles a year to more than 1,000, funding the supplier side of a Western deep-strike build-up whose German buyer still has no export approval.
The award converts February's framework into a funded, multi-year commitment — the pattern the administration has applied this month to Patriot and THAAD interceptor components and, on 14 August, to SM-3 components with Boeing and RTX: long terms to give the primes the certainty to add lines and workforce. Raytheon's Phil Jasper called Tomahawk "the Navy's most important strike weapon". The demand is American first: the Navy fired more than 850 Tomahawks in the opening month of the Iran war against a pre-war inventory of roughly 3,100, and Reuters frames the contract as restocking. The bundling of "associated support" means no clean unit price falls out of the figure; at the target rate the crude division is at or under USD 3.3 million a round, and far higher in the ramp years.
Berlin's file sits behind that queue. Chancellor Merz told the Bundestag on 9 July that Tomahawks "will be acquired by us and stationed in Germany"; the Pistorius–Hegseth letter of intent commits Washington to grant export approval in August (Großwald recorded the letter). With two weeks of the month left there is no approval, no congressional notification, and no document attaching quantity, value or delivery years to a purchase Berlin has so far described only in a government declaration.
A seven-year contract builds the line; it does not allocate the output. Nobody has stated who receives rounds in which year, and the reading the restocking frame supports is that US inventory comes first — the same ordering visible in the Patriot case, where Washington and European capitals have hesitated to release existing stocks to Kyiv. The Tomahawk question is harder in one respect: it is new production, and a sixteen-fold ramp with no published curve makes the early years the scarce ones. Großwald carried the award in Signal No. 125. Two documents would move the German file: the August approval the letter of intent promised, and a Defense Security Cooperation Agency notification. If neither appears by 31 August, the German buy is a declaration waiting on a queue it does not control — which is what Großwald's four-track deep-strike record already implied when it listed Tomahawk as the interim rather than the destination.
