On the morning of 6 August 2026, somewhere in the scrub outside Tan-Tan on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, a fat orange object with stubby wings and a jet engine bolted under its belly rolled forward, lit a rocket booster, and climbed away into a bruised dawn sky. It looked less like a cruise missile than like something a well-funded model-aircraft club might build if you gave it a warhead and a grudge.

That was rather the point. The weapon is called Anthem, it is made by a two-year-old startup called Covenant, and its single most important specification is not range, speed or accuracy. It is price.

Covenant came out of stealth on 9 September 2026 to reveal that the U.S. Army has been flight-testing Anthem, that a factory in Texas opens now, and that it intends to build these things at a rate that would have sounded deranged in any Western missile plant of the last thirty years: up to 12,000 a year across three countries. The design compromises you can see in that photograph are not failures. They are the product.

What Actually Happened at Tan-Tan

The U.S. Army released photographs from Tan-Tan in August without naming the weapon or the company. The captions said only “a defense-industry partner cruise missile,” and one image carried a note that it had been altered to blur out corporate names and logos. It was, the Army said, the first live-fire demonstration at the Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center, or AMTEC — a new U.S.-Moroccan range complex near Tan-Tan intended to let American and Moroccan forces test emerging technology with full electromagnetic-spectrum access.

This was not part of the annual African Lion exercise. AMTEC’s inaugural live-fire was its own event, run jointly by U.S. Africa Command and the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces on 5 and 6 August, with the launch itself on the 6th. Only when Covenant broke cover a month later did anyone outside the programme learn whose missile it was.

Covenant says the Morocco shot also proved out a new framework letting private companies get onto allied ranges quickly — an initiative run out of the office of the Secretary of the Army. The company says it was the first to use it. For a startup that needs to fire a lot of missiles at a lot of targets, that is arguably as valuable as the missile itself.

How Anthem Launches, and Why That Matters

Here is the fact that shapes everything else: Anthem is ground-launched. Covenant has announced no air-launched variant, and nothing in the August imagery suggests one.

But “ground-launched” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Anthem is not an artillery rocket. It is an air-breathing aircraft with a warhead in it. A solid rocket motor gets it off the ground; from there a heavy-fuel jet engine, hung visibly beneath the fuselage in the manner of a cheap target drone, does the actual flying. It has wings. It has a tricycle undercarriage. As Das Kriegsgebiet noted when the photographs were matched to the programme, that landing gear points to a takeoff run down an airstrip under booster power — which would make Anthem, in the words of that report, the crudest design yet seen in this crowded new category.

Crude is a design choice. A missile that trundles down a strip of tarmac does not need a launch canister, a hydraulic erector, a heavy transporter-erector-launcher, or the structural strength to survive being flung out of one. Every one of those things costs money and weight. Delete them and the unit price falls. The trade is obvious and Covenant is not hiding it: you now need somewhere flat to launch from, which is fine if you are operating from an allied island airfield and considerably less fine if someone is shooting at that airfield.

Covenant is also working on a sea-going version. The company says it holds a contract worth roughly $70 million with the U.S. Navy’s Rapid Capabilities Office to develop what it calls Maritime Anthem, a package that includes Defense Exportability Features designed to make the weapon easier to hand to allies. Land and sea, then. Air is conspicuously absent from the announced roadmap.

The Numbers, and How Much to Trust Them

Almost everything published about Anthem’s performance is a target rather than a measurement, and it is worth being blunt about which is which.

Covenant states a payload of more than 200 kg — 441 lb. That is real, in the sense that the company is putting its name to it, and it is also roughly a fifth of the thousand-pound-class warhead on a Tomahawk. Range is not disclosed at all; unconfirmed reports put it around 1,200 km, and company president Abby Denburg told Reuters the weapon was “designed for the China fight,” which implies distance without conceding a figure. Guidance, survivability and accuracy remain entirely undisclosed. For a weapon meant to work inside a contested electromagnetic environment, that last omission is the loudest one.

The price is the headline and it is the softest number of the lot. Reuters reports Covenant expects a mid-six-figure unit cost at full-rate production — not now, not at the current build rate, but once thousands a year are rolling. A Tomahawk is widely quoted at around $3.6 million. Covenant’s argument is that you can afford to put four or five Anthems on a target that would otherwise absorb one Tomahawk, and that having them at all beats having a beautiful missile you ran out of in week three.

The test record is easier to credit. Covenant says Anthem first flew in August 2025 and has flown more than 200 times since, including tests with U.S. government organisations, and that it took part in the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 6 experiments. Two hundred flights in a year is a genuinely startup-ish cadence and it is the strongest evidence on offer that this is a real programme rather than a rendering with a funding round attached.

Three Factories, Two of Which Already Exist

The production plan is where intention and reality are most tangled, so take it piece by piece.

Texas. This one is concrete. Covenant’s roughly 105,000-square-foot plant at Grand Prairie, in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, opened on 9 September 2026 — Reuters simply called it the Dallas plant. Serial production is slated to begin in the first quarter of 2027, ramping toward a stated 5,000 units a year. The opening is fact; the 5,000 is an ambition.

Germany. Covenant already operates a similar-sized facility in Saxony, aimed at a European supply chain and the same 5,000-a-year ceiling. The company says an unidentified international customer should begin receiving German-built Anthems before the end of this year. That customer has not been named, and until a delivery is confirmed this remains the company’s claim rather than a documented fact.

Israel. A smaller site in northern Israel, reported at around 32,000 square feet, is planned for up to 2,000 a year.

Add them up and you get 12,000 weapons a year if — and it is a heroic if — all three plants hit their stated capacity. Covenant has raised more than $250 million across three rounds from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed, books roughly $150 million in orders, and employs over 200 people across the three countries. U.S. Army deliveries are expected in 2027 under an accelerated qualification contract.

“In the first Replicator Initiative, we focused the Pentagon on moving fast to scale delivery of small, inexpensive autonomous systems. That same focus is needed to drive production and delivery of affordable capabilities at higher ranges and larger payloads.”

Kathleen Hicks — Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense and adviser to Covenant, quoted in the company’s launch release

Covenant’s supply-chain story is the least glamorous and probably the most important part of the pitch. The company says most of Anthem’s parts are commercial off-the-shelf, that it deliberately avoided sole-source suppliers, that it has three solid-rocket-motor providers with a fourth in progress, and that it has locked in long-term agreements for more than 4,000 jet engines over the next two years. Missile programmes do not usually die on the assembly line. They die waiting for one part from one vendor.

The Exquisite-Munition Problem, Inverted

For four decades the West optimised its strike weapons in one direction: more capability per round. Stealthier, smarter, longer-legged, more survivable. It worked magnificently, right up until the moment anyone counted the inventory against a war lasting longer than a month.

Tomahawk and the JASSM-ER carried by the B-52 Stratofortress are superb weapons produced in numbers that suit a peacetime budget rather than a peer conflict. Recent operations have made the replenishment maths impossible to ignore: long-range precision munitions are among the hardest things in the arsenal to replace once the shelves empty.

So the industry has started optimising in the opposite direction, and Anthem is one of a cluster of answers rather than a lone bright idea. The Air Force has been chasing palletised mass launch through Rapid Dragon, dropping cruise missiles off cargo ramps. The Pentagon has pushed a whole Franklin-affordable-mass programme line of cheap cruise missiles. Embraer and Anduril have been working on firing Barracuda off a C-390’s ramp. The attritable-drone wave is the same instinct applied to aircraft instead of munitions: accept that each individual unit is worse, and win on the count.

What makes Anthem interesting is how honestly it wears the consequences. Fix a hard ceiling on unit cost before you draw anything, and the design falls out almost automatically: commercial parts, a heavy-fuel engine you can buy four thousand of, a booster instead of a launcher, wheels instead of a canister, a warhead a fifth the size of a Tomahawk’s, and a shape nobody would call stealthy. Every one of those is a compromise. Together they are the argument.

None of which is proof that it works. A weapon with undisclosed guidance, undisclosed range and undisclosed survivability, priced at a figure it has not yet reached, built in factories that have not yet produced one, is a promising set of intentions. Covenant has cleared the hard part that kills most defence startups — it has flown the thing, repeatedly, in front of the U.S. Army, and blown up a target in Morocco while the Army photographed it. The part that kills the survivors comes next, and it is spelled 5,000 a year.

Sources: Covenant company announcement (Business Wire, 9 September 2026); Reuters; The War Zone; Times of Israel; U.S. Africa Command imagery and captions via DVIDS; Dallas Innovates; Calcalist CTech.