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jmowreader

(53,595 posts)
3. Good luck with that, Herrn Merz!
Thu Jul 9, 2026, 02:45 PM
5 hrs ago

Because of the way a Tomahawk is made - Raytheon makes the airframe and fills it with hard-to-produce components they purchase from third-party vendors - it takes 18 to 24 months to make one of these missiles. (They have a very large factory in Tucson, AZ, so many of them can be made simultaneously, but from the "let's start work" order to the "hey Navy, come get your new missile" message it takes at least 18 months.) They can make 1000 per year at full capacity. Trump has fired at least one year's worth of Raytheon's best effort at Iran, and we were already facing a significant shortage of them before Trump slimed his way back into the White House.

Germany apparently believes 400 airframes is initial operating capacity for their Tomahawk fleet. I suspect they're going to discover how good Tomahawks are and want to put them on ships too, so they'll probably wind up needing 1000 to 2000 of them. But if we go by their current IOC and we consider that most of Raytheon's production will either wind up in a US Navy ammo bunker so there's something in there besides cobwebs or they'll go to one of the other four nations that use the Tomahawk, we're probably looking at five years for the Germans to get the first batch they ordered.

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