U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has confirmed that the first two NASAMS surface-to-air missile systems are expected to be delivered to Ukraine as soon as “early next month”.
“Right now what [Ukrainians] need more than anything else … is air defense capability,” Austin said, noting that “we have been pressing hard to get them a NASAMS capability, and we expect that early next month we’ll be able to get them the capability.”
Greg Hayes, chief executive of NASAMS manufacturer Raytheon, announced during an Oct. 25 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that the NASAMS batteries were handed over to the U.S. government.
“We did just deliver two NASAMS systems,” Hayes said. “We delivered two of them to the government a couple of weeks ago…”
NASAMS is the world’s most widely used air defense system in its segment, jointly developed and manufactured in a long-time close partnership between Raytheon and Kongsberg. It provides air defenders with a tailorable, state-of-the-art defense system that can maximize their ability to identify, engage and destroy current and evolving enemy aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicle and emerging cruise missile threats.
NASAMS is renowned for its distributed architecture and flexible network solution capable of solving a wide variety of air defense missions.
A standard NASAMS unit has a modular design comprising a command post the FDC, an active 3D radar Raytheon AN/MPQ-64F1 Sentinel, a passive electro-optical and infrared sensor and a number of missile canister launchers with AMRAAM missiles. Normally, a number of NASAMS fire units are netted together in a uniquely designed ”hard-realtime” communication network to ensure minimum latency over large distances for maximum system performance utilizing the unique capabilities of the AMRAAM missile.
