Navy buys seven years of Tomahawks

The US Navy signed a $22.9 billion, seven-year contract with Raytheon on Monday 17 August to lift Tomahawk production from about 60 missiles a year to more than a thousand⁠¹⁠². A Tomahawk is a long-range cruise missile launched from ships and submarines against targets hundreds of miles inland. US Central Command (CENTCOM), the American military command responsible for the Middle East, had fired 850 of them by 1 April, the most in any single American operation on record.

Do the sum. At 60 missiles a year, replacing those 850 alone takes 14 years. At more than a thousand a year, it takes about ten months. The award runs to 2033 and sits inside the Department of War's Arsenal of Freedom initiative, the department's programme for expanding munitions production, which means the Navy has priced this war past two presidential budget cycles⁠³⁠⁴.

Nobody had put a price on sustaining this war until the Navy signed one. A contract carries a value, a term and a rate, which a statement does not, and this one buys the capacity to keep firing at the pace of the past six months for the rest of the decade. Congress now has a recurring line item to attach conditions to, which is a lever the war powers votes have not produced.

Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao wrote on X that industry had been asked to scale munitions output rapidly and that RTX was delivering⁠⁵. That is a social media post rather than a department release, and it is the only comment from a named official in either account of the award. Raytheon also dates the decision earlier than the war's heaviest month of firing: the company says it delivered three times more Tomahawks in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2025, and the 17 August award firms up a framework agreement signed with the military back in February⁠⁶⁠⁷. A build-out planned before the worst of this year's firing rate is a different thing from an emergency backfill.