Kongsberg secures $50M for U.S. Marine Corps’ ship-killing missile program

The U.S. Navy awarded Norwegian defense manufacturer Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace a contract modification worth roughly $50.3 million on July 2 to buy more launcher missile modules for what the Pentagon calls its “over-the-horizon weapons system,” the hardware behind a Marine Corps program that lets troops sink enemy warships from land without ever putting a manned vessel in the fight.

The missile at the center of that capability is the Naval Strike Missile, a stealthy, subsonic anti-ship weapon Kongsberg originally developed for Norway’s own navy before American forces adopted it following a 2018 Navy competition that eliminated older contenders like the Harpoon and the Lockheed Martin-built Long Range Anti-Ship Missile. The Naval Strike Missile flies extremely low over the water in what defense engineers call a sea-skimming profile, using a passive infrared seeker rather than active radar to find its target, a design choice that makes the missile considerably harder for an adversary to detect or jam compared to weapons that rely on radar guidance. With a published range exceeding 185 km (115 miles) and a roughly 158 kg (348 lb) blast-fragmentation warhead, the missile is built to slip past a warship’s defenses at low altitude before executing evasive maneuvers in its final approach, a combination the Marine Corps and Navy have built an entire modernization strategy around over the past several years.

That modernization effort centers on a system called NMESIS, short for Navy/Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, which the Marine Corps has designated its number one modernization priority. NMESIS pairs the Naval Strike Missile with a remotely operated launcher built on a modified Joint Light Tactical Vehicle chassis, letting Marines fire two missiles at a time from an unmanned ground vehicle that can hide among coastal terrain, islands, or other cover rather than exposing a crewed launch platform to enemy fire. The concept fits squarely within the Marine Corps’ broader Force Design 2030 strategy, which reorganizes traditional infantry regiments into smaller, missile-armed littoral combat teams built specifically to operate dispersed across island chains and coastal corridors in a potential Pacific conflict, holding enemy ships at risk from unexpected, hard-to-target locations rather than concentrating forces in easily identified positions.

Kongsberg’s newest contract modification covers launcher missile modules specifically in support of that over-the-horizon weapons system, work that will be split across an unusually wide international footprint reflecting how deeply integrated the missile’s supply chain has become across NATO allies. The bulk of the work, 56 percent, will happen at Kongsberg’s home facilities in Norway, with additional smaller shares split across Toulouse, France; T’Harde in the Netherlands; Schrobenhausen, Germany; and several American, British, and additional Norwegian locations, each contributing a single-digit percentage of the total effort. That kind of distributed manufacturing arrangement is common for major NATO weapons programs, letting multiple allied nations’ defense industrial bases contribute components and share in the economic benefits of a program their own militaries also plan to use.

This week’s award draws specifically on fiscal year 2025 procurement funding set aside for the Marine Corps, all of which was obligated immediately at the time of the contract award rather than being allocated incrementally over the life of the agreement. Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., the Navy’s primary shipbuilding and weapons acquisition arm, is overseeing the deal, with work expected to continue through May 2031, a five-year window that reflects how the Marine Corps has structured its Naval Strike Missile procurement as a sustained, multiyear pipeline rather than a single bulk purchase.

The Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request called for 32 additional NMESIS launchers and 103 more Naval Strike Missiles, part of a broader plan that industry analysts have said could eventually total 252 launcher vehicles carrying more than 500 missiles once the program reaches full planned strength, with the Marine Corps aiming to field 14 complete NMESIS batteries. Each battery, according to Marine Corps organizational structure, consists of 18 launchers split into two platoons, giving commanders enough distributed firepower to threaten a meaningful stretch of contested coastline simultaneously rather than relying on a small handful of isolated launch positions.

NMESIS has already moved well past the testing phase into active operational deployment across the Pacific, the theater the system was specifically designed to matter most in. Marines from the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment first received the system in November 2024 and have since trained with it across multiple locations, including Okinawa, Japan, where the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment conducted its first NMESIS training in the country in 2025, and the Philippines, where Marines integrated the system into multinational exercises including Balikatan and KAMANDAG alongside Philippine and other allied forces. That operational tempo reflects how central the Pentagon now considers a mobile, land-based anti-ship capability to any potential contingency involving a rival naval power capable of contesting American access to key maritime chokepoints throughout the first island chain stretching from Japan through the Philippines.

Kongsberg’s broader Naval Strike Missile business has grown substantially regardless, with the company landing an $896 million order from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in November 2024 described at the time as the largest missile contract in Kongsberg’s history, a scale of investment that suggests the Pentagon views this specific missile as central to its Pacific strategy for years to come rather than a niche capability tied to a single program milestone.