Germany says it has made a defense deal with Trump to buy Tomahawk missiles. And, as you would expect, it’s immediately not going well.

CSIS reported in May that the US fired more Tomahawks while losing the Iran war than in any other campaign in history. Trump’s spray-and-pray attacks, directed by Palantir, wasted so many missiles to little effect that replenishing the inventory is a near-term risk for the United States.

Germany is announcing it will enter a queue behind the US Navy’s own restocking priority, for a subsonic 1970s-architecture missile, from a production line that has run at well under a hundred units a year. Someone in Germany has not been paying attention.

Delivery timeline? None.

Cost? Unstated.

Quantity? Unstated.

Germany’s leader Merz gave none of the details that make a deal a deal.

Meanwhile, Fire Point in Ukraine iterated the FP-5 from announcement to combat use in about a year, at something like a quarter of Tomahawk unit cost, delivering half a ton of explosive per warhead to destroy Russian war factories. Fire Point’s drone line has demonstrated strikes past 2,500 km, hitting the Omsk refinery in Siberia this week.

Germany acts like an old depleted 1,600 km American missile wait-list is big political news, while Germany is already funding Ukrainian long-range production directly. I mean, ELSA exists because Europe identified this dependency in 2024.

Deals involving Trump’s TLAM also means buying the broken mission-planning chain that comes with it, which is a strange hedge against an unreliable and unfriendly Washington. The strategic gap Merz says he’s closing was the sovereignty gap, and the Tomahawk Deal makes it open wider.

Germany should be embarrassed to announce any deal with Trump. But this deal in particular reads like a horrible joke.