TSAMTO, July 21. The United Kingdom and Germany are jointly developing a long-range strike missile system as part of the Deep Precision Strike (DPS) program.
The declared range of the promising weapon will exceed 2 thousand km, the deadline for completion of development is until 2034.
According to Die Welt, the program is being implemented as a follow-up to the bilateral defense agreement signed by London and Berlin in October 2024. British Defense Minister John Healey and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius officially confirmed for the first time the launch of joint work on a new missile system on May 15, 2025 at a meeting in Berlin.
The type of a promising weapon was not specified at the time of the announcement. Both ballistic and cruise variants are being considered, or a combination of technical solutions with elements of hypersonic technologies. The claimed range of over 2,000 km corresponds to the category of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMS).
As of February 2026, the program has moved to the stage of joint technical research focused on accelerated development of both stealth and hypersonic weapons options. The British Ministry of Defense has allocated 770 million pounds for a joint program with Germany for the next four years as part of a total expenditure of over 400 million pounds for long-range and hypersonic weapons programs in the current fiscal year.
On January 29, 2026, the German Ministry of Defense published an explanatory material, where the DPS program is listed as an element of a complex of parallel national programs for the creation of long-range weapons. The list includes the purchase of American JASSM-ER missiles, negotiations on the acquisition of Tomahawk cruise missiles, the modernization of the Taurus missile (the Taurus Neo project), as well as Germany's participation in the European hypersonic weapons development program ELSA (European Long-Range Strike Approach).
The DPS program is initially focused on the land-based option, followed by the study of air and sea-based capabilities.
At the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8, 12 European NATO member states (Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey) officially announced the Deep Precision Strike Capability Investment Initiative with total financing of 50.66 billion dollars for a ten-year period for development weapons with a range from 300 km to over 2 thousand km.
Within the framework of the NATO Defense Industry Forum, held on the same days, six states (Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom) launched a separate high-priority project for the joint development of a long-range ground-based weapon, complementing the British-German DPS program.
According to The Daily Telegraph, France, The Netherlands and Ukraine may join the DPS long-range weapons development program, in addition to the UK and Germany. The commissioning of a promising weapon of destruction is expected in the 2030s.
The Deep Precision Strike program is considered as an element of the broader architecture of European long-range strike capabilities, which also includes the trilateral British-French-Italian Stratus project (replacing the Storm Shadow cruise missile) and the UK's participation in the Precision Strike Missile program jointly with the United States and Australia.
