Thales and Kongsberg to establish communications joint venture

Image of military personnel taking part in ‘CWIX25' held between 2 and 20 June 2025 at the Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. (NATO)

France's Thales and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace have signed an agreement to establish a joint venture company in Norway in secure communications, according to a 27 June Thales press release.

Kongsberg's tactical communication unit and Thales' cryptography and secure communications business will be connected in the joint venture, according to Kongsberg. Thales in Norway already provides crypto networks and voice communications systems and Kongsberg delivers tactical radios for the land domain and networks for other systems, according to the press release.

The new company has been set up in response to European armed forces calling for an increase in defence and security including with greater large-scale production and interoperability, Kongsberg said in a 27 June press statement.

NATO concluded three weeks of ‘Coalition Warrior Interoperability eXploration, eXperimentation, eXamination, eXercise' (CWIX25), which focused on digital interoperability by tackling gaps within command-and-control (C2) and information technology (IT) services, the alliance announced on 23 June. One of the key takeaways from the exercises was that NATO's future success relies on the interconnectivity of its forces.

The announcement from Kongsberg and Thales comes days after NATO nations agreed to raise defence spending to 5% of their countries' GDP at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague. NATO's annual budgets and programmes are worth around EUR4.6 billion (USD5.39 billion). This supports a number of its structures and operations as well as its military infrastructure that includes satellite communications and C2. NATO's estimated budget represents 0.3% of total allied defence spending, the alliance said.