Taurus KEPD 350

A German-Swedish air-launched stealthy cruise missile with a unique hardened-target penetrating warhead, designed for deep strike at over 500 km, terrain-following flight at 35 m, and multi-layer bunker defeat — operational in the Luftwaffe, Spanish and South Korean air forces.

Overview

The Taurus KEPD 350 (Target Adaptive Unitary and dispenser Robotic Ubiquity System / Kinetic Energy Penetrator and Destroyer) is a subsonic stand-off air-launched cruise missile developed jointly by Germany and Sweden. It arms the Luftwaffe’s Panavia Tornado, Spain’s EF-18A+ Hornets, and the Republic of Korea Air Force’s F-15K Slam Eagles, offering a >500 km reach and a highly specialised warhead tailored to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets. The missile is produced by Taurus Systems GmbH, a joint venture between MBDA Deutschland and Saab Bofors Dynamics, with deliveries starting in 2005. It has no confirmed combat employment, but its political prominence has grown enormously since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Berlin repeatedly rebuffed Kyiv’s requests for the weapon.

Development

Germany funded development of the KEPD 350 in 1998 after Cold-War-era plans to acquire the French Apache were abandoned, according to Wikipedia. Design work ran from 1995 to 2005 at Taurus Systems GmbH in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria. The first production rounds were delivered to the Luftwaffe in 2005, with the 600-missile order completed by December 2010 at a cost of €570 million. Export customers followed: Spain ordered 43 missiles for its Hornets (delivered by August 2010), and South Korea acquired 177 KEPD 350K missiles in 2013, later topping up with a further 90 rounds in 2018 to equip its F-15K force. After a long production hiatus, the Ukraine-war-driven procurement surge revived the line: a maintenance and modernisation contract (“Major Overhaul 2”) was signed in December 2024 to keep German stocks operational to at least 2045, as reported by European Security & Defence. In December 2025 the German Bundestag released funds for the first tranche of a capability-enhanced successor, the Taurus NEO, clearing the way for serial production from about 2029.

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