The first NASAMS air defense system for Ukraine arrived from Norway to Poland.
A few hours ago, a Ukrainian military transport aircraft An-124 took off from the territory of the Norwegian military air base Evenes, which delivered the first battery of NATO-standard NASAMS air defense systems to Rzeszow, Poland. This, apparently, is about two of the three fire platoons, including 8 launchers, two control vehicles and two radars, provided that NASAMS II variants were sent to Ukraine. In fact, the complexes have arrived at the moment at the Polish military air base, however, the latter could well have been transferred to the west of Ukraine tonight, which needs to be clarified.
Earlier, Norway announced its readiness to transfer additional NASAMS systems and missiles to the latter to Ukraine, while in the near future similar air defense systems will arrive from the United States, as previously announced in Washington. In total, according to a number of data, the United States will be ready to provide Ukraine with two NASAMS SAM batteries, and one more battery will be transferred to Ukraine by Norway.
Experts note that the real effectiveness of the use of the Norwegian NASAMS air defense systems remains in question, however, even with a target destruction efficiency of 50%, this may be quite enough for Kyiv, especially given the rather large number of transferred launchers.
What actually is the NASAMS Missile Defense System?
The Norwegian Advanced Surface to Air Missile System or NASAMS is a distributed and networked short-to medium-range ground-based air defense system developed by Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA) and Raytheon. The system defends against unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), helicopters, cruise missiles, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), and aircraft.
NASAMS was the first application of a surface-launched AIM-120 AMRAAM (Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile). NASAMS 2 is an upgraded version of the system capable of using Link 16, which has been operational since 2007. As of 2022 NASAMS 3 is the latest upgrade; deployed in 2019, it adds capability to fire AIM-9 Sidewinder and IRIS-T SLS short-range missiles and AMRAAM-ER extended-range missiles, and introduces mobile air-liftable launchers.
NASAMS has been exported to the United States, with the NASAMS 2 upgrade having been exported to Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Oman, and Chile.
The NASAMS system has the range of 30 km for NASAMS 2 and 50 km for NASAMS 3.