Less than five percent of the components in Covenant's German-built Anthem missile come from outside Europe. That's according to the company's own CEO, and it's a genuinely unusual thing for an American defense startup to say out loud, let alone build a factory around. Covenant's stated goal is to push that number to zero entirely. For a US-Israeli company two years old, founded in 2024, that's a striking bet on where European defense-buying preferences are actually heading, and it explains why Berlin is talking to a company almost nobody outside the industry had heard of a few months ago.
The timing only makes sense once you see the hole Germany is actually trying to fill. Berlin's only current standoff strike weapon is the Taurus cruise missile, roughly 600 in stock, and Defense News's own reporting lays out just how shaky the rest of that arsenal actually looks: a new Taurus variant is still years from being fielded, promised American Tomahawk deliveries look uncertain after the missile got used heavily in the Iran war, and Europe's own collaborative long-range strike program, ELSA, only just got started. Anthem isn't competing against a healthy portfolio of alternatives, it's being evaluated because Germany's existing options are each individually compromised in some way.
What Covenant is actually offering solves a different problem than raw performance specs. Anthem carries a warhead over 200 kilograms with a reported range past 1,500 kilometers, but the real pitch is volume and price: a per-missile cost in the "mid-six figures," considerably cheaper than a Raytheon Tomahawk, aimed at production rates up to 1,000 missiles a year. CEO Michael Kaufman's framing of why that scale matters is blunt: countries like Germany would need tens of thousands of long-range missiles to actually threaten a country the size of Russia, and expensive, hand-built high-end missiles were never going to get anyone to that number. "If our stockpiles run thin," he said, "so does our deterrence." That's the same underlying math driving cheaper interceptor and drone programs across NATO all year, mass beats sophistication when the alternative is running out of weapons entirely.
The factory itself is a real, opened facility, not a pitch deck, 110,000 square feet near Leipzig airport, a site that's also a military logistics hub, alongside Covenant's original Texas plant and a smaller Israeli facility. A Leipzig media report noted the German site won't handle explosives on-site, a regulatory choice that lets it operate under lighter industrial rules than a full munitions plant would require. Serial production is set for early 2027, with the company saying at least two unnamed European customers, not just Germany, will receive their first missiles that same quarter.
The competition Anthem is actually up against fits neatly into the pattern this same reporting describes elsewhere in Germany's evaluation process: Ukraine's own Fire Point, maker of the Flamingo cruise missile, is reportedly one of the other systems on Berlin's shortlist for this same "cheaper, mass-producible" category. That's genuinely notable, a wartime Ukrainian defense company and a two-year-old Silicon Valley-backed startup both being seriously considered by one of Europe's largest militaries, ahead of the continent's own more established, legacy missile makers. Whether that reflects how urgently Germany needs volume right now, or how unusually open European procurement has become to unconventional suppliers this year, the practical result is the same: a startup nobody had heard of in January is now on track to be manufacturing cruise missiles on German soil by spring.
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