Norway receives first Joint Strike Missile for F-35As

An artist's impression of a JSM just after launch from the internal weapons bay of an F-35A Lightning II. (Kongsberg)

Norway has received the first Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA) Joint Strike Missile (JSM) to equip its fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) combat aircraft.

The Norwegian Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced the milestone, saying the first of an undisclosed number of missiles to equip the Royal Norwegian Air Force's (RNoAF's) recently received fleet of 52 F-35As was handed over at Ørland Air Base on 28 April.

“Norway has become the first country to receive the full delivery of all its planned F-35 fighter jets… Today, the [Norwegian] Armed Forces have also received their first super missile from the Norwegian Defence Materiel Agency and KDA. Work will now begin to stockpile the JSM missile at Ørland Air Base,” Minister of Defence Tore Sandvik said at the handover ceremony.

As noted by Janes Weapons: Air Launched, the JSM is a Norwegian-developed precision‐guided stand‐off missile, optimised for use by aircraft against both naval and land targets. The low-observable weapon provides anti‐ship attack capability to combat aircraft by using imaging infrared (IIR) guidance and a 120 kg impact or time delay warhead.

Designed for internal and external carriage aboard the conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) F-35A and the carrier variant (CV) F-35C (it is too large for the internal weapons bays of the short take-off and vertical landing [STOVL] F-35B), the JSM has an estimated speed of Mach 0.9 and a range in excess of 275 km.

As well as Norway, the JSM has been sold to Australia, Japan, and the United States for carriage aboard their F-35As.

For more information on the JSM, please see