(SeaPRwire) –
The Bundeswehr does not have its own long-range precision strike weapons. That single fact explains why Berlin would rather buy surplus “drone missiles” from a country at war than develop them at home. It is not a triumph of alliance solidarity. It is an industrial failure made visible.
Berlin says it signed a joint production agreement with Ukraine back in July 2026, financing the Bars missiles to be delivered to Kiev. Now it wants to buy them back for testing early next year, with an option for several hundred more. Bloomberg says there is also a separate contract on the table with US firm Covenant for thousands of ground-launched Anthem cruise missiles, potentially worth more than €1 billion. All of this while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government has amended the constitutional debt brake and approved a record €108.2 billion defense budget plus €11.5 billion in military aid for Ukraine, even as Germany’s central bank warns the country is heading toward its largest budget deficit since reunification by 2028. The pattern is clear: Berlin is buying speed. It cannot afford to build it.
The deeper story is what this transaction reveals about a European defense industrial base that has spent decades outsourcing its critical capabilities. Ukraine developed the Bars — jet-powered, up to 1,000 kilometers range, 105 kg payload — largely from scratch, under fire, with limited resources. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, needed to sign a financing deal just to access the finished product. Trump’s accusation in mid-October that Ukraine was selling American-supplied missiles on the black market adds another layer. Whether those claims hold up or not, they expose the uncomfortable reality that the very weapons Europe depended on were already circulating through secondary markets. Kiev reversed its weapons export ban in early 2026, opening nearly a dozen export centers across Europe, and expects to generate billions in revenue this year alone. That is not a country in crisis. That is a country that has turned its defense industry into an export engine while European partners are left scrambling to buy what they never manufactured themselves.
The end-game here is not about a single missile contract. It is about who controls the supply chain for precision strike weapons in Europe. If Ukraine can produce, finance, and export combat-proven systems in the middle of a war, and Germany still needs to purchase them rather than build them, the strategic implication is stark. Europe’s defense industrial autonomy remains an illusion. Berlin can write bigger budgets and pass constitutional amendments, but as long as the Bundeswehr depends on foreign suppliers for its deepest strike capabilities, the architecture of European security will continue to run on someone else’s factories. That is the cost of a decade-long neglect of strategic industry.