WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Defense startup Covenant on Wednesday unveiled a heavy-payload, long-range cruise missile it says can be quickly mass-produced at a relatively low cost and which will be produced partially in Israel, in the latest challenge to major US weapons makers from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors.
The announcement from Covenant after two years of development coincides with efforts by the US and its allies to restock missile inventories with less expensive and plentiful long-range precision-strike missiles after the war in Iran depleted stocks of the critical armaments.
Its missile, called Anthem, is a ground-launched cruise missile carrying a payload of more than 200 kilograms (441 pounds). In a fight, it would be used in high volumes to work alongside other long-range missiles like the 1,000-mile (1,609 kilometers) range Tomahawk cruise missile produced by RTX’s Raytheon unit and the 600-mile Lockheed Martin Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER).
Comparable weapons from the biggest defense contractors are “being built in small quantities at really high prices. And so we set out to change that,” Michael Kaufman, Covenant’s co-founder and CEO, told Reuters in an interview.
