Defense Express has outlined how many Tomahawk missiles Ukraine could realistically expect to receive if such supplies are approved.While Washington is still deciding whether to supply Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine — and Moscow keeps issuing threats, insisting these long-range weapons won’t change anything — one simple question remains: how many are actually available?To answer that, it’s essential to know how many Tomahawks the U.S. has, how many are produced, and how these numbers compare with existing production and export contracts. Much of this information is public and based on official U.S. government documents.Overall, it’s important to understand that the Tomahawk — which began development in 1972 and entered serial production in 1983 — has had roughly 9,000 units produced in total. The latest precise figure (as of March 2024) is 8,919 units across all variants.And of course, since the 1980s the U.S. has used Tomahawks quite actively in a number of wars. According to the U.S. Navy, from their first combat use in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, over 2,300 of these cruise missiles have been expended. Those figures likely refer up to 2022, and since then more than 165 additional missiles are reported to have been used against Yemeni Houthi targets and Iranian nuclear facilities.So in total over 2,465 Tomahawks have been launched — from which you must subtract those expended in training, those retired after reaching end-of-service life, and those that never went through upgrade programs.The most commonly cited unofficial figure for Tomahawk stocks in the U.S. is currently about 4,000 missiles — but that’s only an approximate estimate as of 2020. It doesn’t really explain where some 2,500 missiles went, since that’s a huge number unlikely to have been expended in exercises or simply written off.Another crucial parameter is Tomahawk production — the ability to replenish stocks. And on that front the situation is worse than one might imagine. According to the Pentagon’s 2025 budget request, production was 68 missiles in FY2023, 34 in FY2024, and the FY2025 plan covered only 22 missiles. The FY2026 plan calls for 57 missiles.In a public notice dated December 19, 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense announced a $401 million contract to Raytheon to produce 131 Tomahawks in the Block V variant, allocated as follows: 26 for the Army, 16 for the Marine Corps, 11 for Australia, and 78 for Japan. Deliveries were scheduled through March 2028.Earlier, in May 2022 Raytheon won a contract for 154 Tomahawk Block V (70 for the Navy, 54 for the Marines, 30 for the Army) for $217 million, with deliveries through January 2025.Thus, the known production tempo can be estimated at about 50 missiles per year, though that depends on orders and likely doesn't reflect Raytheon’s full manufacturing capacity.Still, these figures allow a realistic estimate of how many Tomahawks the U.S. could immediately allocate to Ukraine — assuming there are spare launchers.