Raytheon Wins $22.9 Billion to Take Tomahawk Output From 60 Missiles a Year to Over 1,000

The US Navy awarded Raytheon a seven-year contract worth $22.9 billion on August 17 to expand production of the BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile. The award converts a framework agreement signed with the manufacturer in February into a funded multi-year buy.

The contract is built around a single number: annual output of more than 1,000 missiles. Raytheon currently delivers roughly 60 Tomahawks a year. Reaching four figures means an order-of-magnitude expansion of a production line that has spent two decades tuned to a maintenance-level rate, and the company says it will work with hundreds of small and mid-sized suppliers to scale up.

"Tomahawk is the Navy's most important strike weapon, able to target hostile forces hundreds of miles away without ever risking the lives of our sailors," Raytheon president Phil Jasper said in a statement accompanying the award. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said the deal would accelerate production at "unprecedented speed" and that the Pentagon was "using every available tool to meet the demand of current operations."

Those operations are the reason for the order. More than 1,000 Tomahawks have been fired during the 2026 Iran conflict, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, against a pre-war inventory of roughly 3,000 missiles. A third of the stockpile was expended in months, and at 60 missiles a year the replacement of that expenditure alone would have taken until the 2040s.

The Tomahawk is launched from the vertical launch cells of surface combatants and from the torpedo tubes and payload tubes of submarines, which makes the ramp-up a question of magazines as much as of missiles. GlobalMilitary.net data credits the US Navy with 75 active Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, seven remaining Ticonderoga-class cruisers and 26 Virginia-class submarines in service, the fleet behind the first place the United States holds in the global military power ranking. The four Ohio-class guided-missile submarines that once carried 154 Tomahawks apiece are leaving service, and the payload-module Virginias replacing them are being reclassified as SSGNs.

The missile is also increasingly an export item. Japan fired its first Tomahawk from a destroyer in July, joining the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as an operator, and the Navy says the multi-year deal is meant to give "a stable, predictable supply for the Navy and allies" rather than force partners to queue behind American requirements.

The constraint now is time rather than money. A Tomahawk takes 18 to 24 months to move from order to delivery, so the first missiles bought under the contract will not reach magazines before 2028, and the 1,000-a-year rate will depend on new supplier capacity coming online. The Navy has not said what interim rate it expects in the meantime.