February 18, 2024: The Ukraine War proved to be a major boost in sales of the European air defense systems like the Norwegian NASAMS and Germany’s IRIS-T SAM (Surface to Air Missile) system. Until 2022, IRIS-T found it difficult to compete against the similar and earlier NASAMS system. While demand for NASAMS was also heavy, IRIS-T was a bit cheaper and available to help NASAMS customers who did not want to wait.

This all began in 1998 when Norway pioneered the use of American AMRAAM air-to-air missiles as surface-to-air weapons and developed the fire control and launcher equipment needed to make it all work. It was a simple but very effective use of air-to-air missiles for air defense. Other air-to-air missiles have been used for ground-based air defense systems, but the Norwegian version is seen as the best of the lot. Norway has six NASAMS batteries for its own defense. Eleven other nations, like Hungary, Spain, Holland, Chile, and the United States, Finland and Lithuania also used NASAMS before the Ukraine War. Fortunately, NASAMS was still in production but soon found itself unable to keep up with demand, with Ukraine becoming the latest user.

NASAMS was initially developed for the Norwegian Air Force by Norwegian firm Kongsberg, in cooperation with American partner Raytheon, which produces AMRAAM. A major upgrade, NASAMS 2, officially entered service in 2007 and since then it has gained interest in more nations.

NASAMS’ popularity is due to a truly open architecture that, unlike competitor systems, allows NASAMS to be used with a wide variety of radars. Initially NASAMS used the American made MPQ-64 Sentinel radar but some customers requested a system that could work with different radars and air-to-air missiles. NASAMS has been tested and configured to work with more than 25 different radar systems and can fire just about any air-to-air missile that can be fired from NATO aircraft. All that is required is modifications to the size and electrical connections in the NASAMS launcher cells and software modification of the fire control system. Since NATO has long-established standards for “NATO weapons”, NASAMS takes full advantage of this.

So far NASAMS has been configured with AIM-120 AMRAAM together with the longer-range Sidewinder infrared-homing ER variant, AIM-9X, and the European IRIS-T. The last one is an interesting story. Norway had a big stock of IRIS-T for their F-16 fighters, but the new Norwegian F-35 is not compatible with IRIS-T, so they decided to use this very modern European missile as an anti-aircraft missile in NASAMS systems. This example clearly shows how flexible this system is while the competitor systems are tied to a limited number of missiles and radar.

A typical NASAMS battery consists of 12 launcher vehicles each carrying six missiles, eight radar vehicles, one fire control center, and one tactical control vehicle. NASAMS does not provide protection for a large area because the max range of its missiles is 30-50 kilometers while the range of its radar target detection vehicles is up t0 160 kilometers.

Seven years later, in 2005, Germany introduced a similar and cheaper anti-aircraft missile system based on called IRIS-T. The IRIS-T missile has a shorter range than NASAMs systems that use the American AMRAAM. Launched from the ground, AMRAAM has a range of 30 kilometers. The updated AMRAAM 2 has a 50 kilometers range. IRIS-T has a range of 25 kilometers.

Ukraine received both NASAMS and IRIS-T and found that both systems were equally effective at intercepting Russian missiles used against cities. Ukraine also received the longer range (200 kilometers) Patriot air defense system. The Ukrainians found a way to use Patriot against Russian hypersonic missiles aimed at ground targets. The Russians were not expecting this and were not pleased.

One IRIS-T battery consists of three truck-mounted launchers carrying eight missiles each. The missiles have a range of 40 kilometers, and a separate command vehicle that can be positioned up to 20 kilometers away. A NASAMS battery consists of six to nine launcher vehicles, each with six missiles in storage/launching containers. These are controlled by a radar and fire control system, each mounted on trucks.