Norway Kongsberg Wins $472M Order for Joint Strike Missiles to Equip New F-35 Customer.

Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace has secured a NOK 4.7 billion, or about $472 million, contract to supply its Joint Strike Missile to a new undisclosed customer, the Norwegian company announced on June 30, 2026. The order adds another long-range precision strike weapon to allied fighter inventories and strengthens F-35-linked capabilities for anti-ship attack and land strike missions.

The deal makes the customer the sixth known buyer of the air-launched missile after Norway, Japan, Australia, the United States, and Germany. Its growing adoption highlights demand for stealth-compatible stand-off weapons able to extend fighter reach, improve survivability, and support deterrence in contested maritime and land environments.

Related topic: Airbus Defence and Space Taps Brave1 for Ukraine Battlefield Drone Tests and European Counter-UAS.

Kongsberg’s Joint Strike Missile secures a NOK 4.7 billion order from an undisclosed sixth customer, expanding allied access to a long-range air-launched weapon designed for F-35 anti-ship and precision land-attack missions (Picture source: Kongsberg).

The absence of a disclosed quantity prevents any credible calculation of unit cost, and the contract should therefore be read primarily as an industrial and capability signal rather than as a transparent procurement benchmark. What can be assessed is the role of the weapon being acquired. The Joint Strike Missile is an air-launched derivative of Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile, redesigned around internal carriage, longer-range air release profiles and dual maritime-land attack use. This makes it relevant to air forces that need to hold naval combatants, coastal radar sites, command nodes and fixed infrastructure at risk without relying only on larger cruise missiles or externally carried anti-ship weapons.

The technical baseline is now well established. Kongsberg lists the JSM at 416 kg, with a length of 4.00 m, high subsonic speed and a range greater than 350 km. The missile carries a 118 kg warhead, consistent with its role as a precision weapon designed to disable or destroy selected aim points rather than overwhelm a target through warhead mass alone. Against a surface combatant, that means the relevant effect is often a mission kill: damage to sensors, combat management equipment, propulsion areas, weapons spaces or command compartments. Against land targets, the same warhead class is better suited to radars, air-defense components, parked aircraft, fuel installations, communications sites and lightly hardened command facilities than to deeply buried infrastructure.

The missile’s guidance package is central to its operational value. Kongsberg describes a mission-planning system designed to exploit sea and land geography, a low-altitude flight profile, accurate navigation and automatic target recognition supported by an imaging infrared seeker. Open reporting also identifies inertial navigation, terrain-reference navigation and a two-way network data link. In practical terms, this architecture reduces dependence on continuous GPS availability, allows the missile to fly routes shaped by terrain or coastal clutter, and enables passive terminal acquisition rather than radar emissions that would alert electronic-support receivers on the target ship or nearby air-defense units.

The armament should not be judged only by range. A 350 km-plus missile carried by a fighter aircraft changes the geometry of maritime strike because the launch aircraft does not need to cross the outer engagement zone of many shipborne surface-to-air missile systems to create a threat. If launched from several axes, the JSM can force a naval group to divide sensor coverage, expend interceptors, and defend against low-altitude inbound missiles that appear late on radar because of sea-skimming flight and horizon limits. In littoral areas, the same characteristics complicate defense planning because islands, fjords, coastal terrain and civilian maritime traffic can mask flight paths and increase the burden on target classification.

Internal carriage on the F-35 is the main differentiator. Norway’s Ministry of Defence stated in April 2025 that the JSM can be carried inside the F-35 weapons bay, preserving range and low observability, while Kongsberg’s June 2026 U.S. Air Force announcement specifically noted internal carriage on the F-35A. The operational point is straightforward: an F-35 carrying internal JSMs can approach, classify and engage targets with a lower radar signature than an aircraft carrying large external weapons. That matters most in the first days of a campaign, when air-defense radars, maritime surveillance networks and long-range surface-to-air missiles have not yet been degraded.

The missile also gives smaller and medium-sized air forces a way to convert limited fighter fleets into strategic strike assets. Norway’s own approach illustrates this logic. On April 28, 2025, Oslo marked delivery of its first JSM and completion of its 52-aircraft F-35 fleet, with the missiles to be stockpiled at Ørland Air Base. For a country defending long coastlines, maritime approaches and critical infrastructure, the F-35/JSM pairing gives national commanders a means to threaten naval forces and fixed land targets at distance without depending entirely on submarines, coastal batteries or allied bombers.

The new order also follows a visible acceleration in JSM procurement. On June 5, 2026, the U.S. Air Force awarded Kongsberg a $240.9 million firm-fixed-price contract for Lot Two JSM production, covering all-up rounds, containers, test hardware and support items, with work in Kongsberg, Norway, expected to be completed by November 30, 2028. Kongsberg separately described the U.S. order as worth about NOK 2.7 billion, with deliveries expected by the end of 2029. Germany also signed a further NOK 3.5 billion JSM contract in May 2026 after becoming the fifth customer in 2025, indicating that current demand is not limited to initial qualification stocks.

For the undisclosed customer, the immediate military value is not simply the purchase of another cruise missile. It is the acquisition of a weapon that combines internal fighter carriage, passive terminal sensing, terrain-informed routing, maritime and land target sets, and a warhead sized for precision effects against operationally important nodes. The broader implication is that F-35 operators are moving from aircraft procurement toward stockpile depth and mission-specific weapons integration. That shift is more important than the identity of the buyer: it shows that long-range strike inventories, not only combat aircraft numbers, are becoming a measurable element of deterrence, readiness and allied burden-sharing.

Explore More Defense News

• Land Defense News
• Naval Defense News
• Defense Aerospace News

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.