Naval Strike Missile (NSM)

Norway's stealth ship-killer — the Naval Strike Missile is a low-flying, fully passive cruise missile that emits nothing for enemy defences to detect, finds its target with an imaging-infrared seeker, weaves around islands and coastlines at sea-skimming height, and throws unpredictable terminal maneuvers to defeat point defences. Built by Kongsberg for the demanding Norwegian fjords, it has become the West's anti-ship weapon of choice — fired from US Navy warships, Marine Corps truck launchers and the navies of a dozen nations.

Overview

The Naval Strike Missile (NSM; originally Nytt sjømålsmissil, "new sea-target missile") is a stealthy, subsonic anti-ship and land-attack cruise missile developed by Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace as the successor to its Penguin missile. Its defining quality is survivability through passivity and stealth: a low radar-cross-section airframe, a sea-skimming and terrain-following flight profile that uses GPS/INS and a terrain database to hug the surface and fly around landmasses, and a fully passive imaging-infrared (IIR) seeker that homes on the target's heat signature without radiating anything a defender could detect or jam. It carries a ~120–125 kg programmable warhead in a titanium body. The result is a missile that is extremely hard to see coming and hard to stop — which is why it has been adopted far beyond Norway, including by the US Navy (as the RGM-184A) and the US Marine Corps, and produced in the US in partnership with Raytheon (RTX).

Development

Kongsberg developed the NSM in the early 2000s as a fifth-generation replacement for the Penguin, optimized for the cluttered, island-strewn coastal environment of Norway where a missile must navigate terrain and survive dense defences, per The Defense Post and Wikipedia. It entered service around 2012 on Norwegian frigates and coastal corvettes, then spread rapidly: it won the US Navy competition to arm the Littoral Combat Ships and the new Constellation-class frigates (as the RGM-184A), was adopted by the US Marine Corps for its ground-launched NMESIS anti-ship system, and selected by Poland, Germany, Australia, Romania, Malaysia and others — Kongsberg producing it with Raytheon for the US market. An air-launched derivative, the Joint Strike Missile (JSM), was developed for internal carriage in the F-35's weapons bay, giving the family a longer-ranged, stealth-fighter-launched strike option.

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