Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace

Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace was carved out as a standalone company in 1987, when the long-running state-owned arms maker Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk was restructured following its near-collapse in the wake of the Toshiba-Kongsberg export-controls scandal. The defence and aerospace activities were absorbed into the new Kongsberg Gruppen holding, listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, with the defence unit retaining the historic factory site in Kongsberg, the small town in Buskerud county that has built weapons for Norway since the seventeenth century. The unit today sits inside Kongsberg Gruppen alongside Kongsberg Maritime and Kongsberg Digital, and is run as a wholly owned subsidiary with thousands of staff spread across Norway, the United States, Poland, Germany, Australia and Canada.

The product portfolio is anchored by three families that have made the firm one of the few European defence houses with genuine global reach. The Protector remote weapon station, a stabilised mount that lets a crew operate a heavy machine gun or 30 mm cannon from inside an armoured vehicle, has been fielded in more than twenty thousand units since the early 2000s and forms the basis of the U.S. Army’s Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station programme on the Stryker, M1 Abrams and other platforms. The Naval Strike Missile, a sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missile with passive imaging seeker, has been picked up by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to replace the venerable Harpoon and is fitted to littoral combat ships, frigates and shore-based truck launchers; its air-launched variant, the Joint Strike Missile, is the only anti-ship cruise missile that fits inside the F-35’s internal weapons bay. Together with Raytheon, Kongsberg also co-develops NASAMS, a medium-range ground-based air defence system that uses AMRAAM missiles in a launcher and command-and-control package built in Norway.

Customers stretch from Washington to Warsaw to Canberra. NASAMS batteries protect the airspace over the U.S. Capitol and have been supplied in large numbers to Ukraine since 2022, where they have been credited with a high kill rate against Russian cruise missiles and Shahed drones. Poland signed multi-billion-kroner deals for coastal Naval Strike Missile batteries and additional NASAMS units, and Germany and Romania followed in 2023 and 2024. The company’s order backlog has ballooned through the war in Ukraine, with Kongsberg Gruppen reporting record revenues and announcing capacity expansions at Kongsberg, in Mesa, Arizona, and at a new missile assembly plant near the Australian east coast.

The firm’s autonomous-systems work feeds into the broader portfolio rather than standing apart from it. Software for target tracking, image-based terminal guidance and networked fires sits inside the Protector, the NSM, the Vanguard launcher and the company’s contributions to NATO’s Future Indirect Fires programme. Kongsberg’s role in the Type 26 frigate combat system and in unmanned surface vessel projects with the Royal Norwegian Navy keeps it close to the maritime end of the autonomy debate, where Norway’s long coastline and Russian Northern Fleet bases make it a natural test bed.

For a company in a country of five million people, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace has carved out a position that few European peers can match: a serious missile house, a dominant exporter of remote weapon stations, and the European partner of choice for American primes looking for systems that can be sold inside NATO without U.S. export-control friction.