Hungary’s air defense will be strengthened by a 21st-century, high-tech Norwegian missile system starting this year, the Hungarian Ministry of Defence announced in Kongsberg, Norway. The Ministry of Defense quoted Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky in a statement delivered to MTI on Friday, saying that maximizing the effectiveness of the air defense system is of prime importance to a country’s defense capability. The NASAMS missile system from the Norwegian defense company Kongsberg, with missiles that also support the Israeli Vaskupola anti-missile system that monitors the country’s airspace, gives the modern Hungarian military an advanced and striking air defense capability that will effectively perform Hungary’s air defense tasks once the missile system is installed.
The Ministry of Defence emphasized that NASAMS is the most common in the category of short-medium-range air defense missile systems, and the U.S. AMRAAM missile used by the system is the most common such missile, as it is also the basic armament of NATO fighter jets. One of the advantages of the system is that its radars and missile launchers are installed far from each other, which makes it much more difficult for targeted aircraft to defend against it and for enemy forces to neutralize it than traditional air defense missile systems. The Hungarian Defense Forces will acquire 6+1 fire units, which will be sent to the 205th Air Defense Missile Regiment in Gy?r. The official handover of the equipment to Hungary is expected in August.
NASAMS (Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, also known as the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System) is a distributed and networked short- to medium-range :?4? 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 fixed wing aircraft? firing any of a wide range of existing missiles. 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. NASAMS has proven interoperability with longer range systems such as Patriot.
NASAMS has been exported to the United States, with the NASAMS 2 upgrade having been exported to Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Oman, and Chile. There were 13 official operators as of September 2022. Kongsberg stated: “NASAMS is in operational use in Norway, Spain, USA, the Netherlands, Finland, Oman, Lithuania, Indonesia and one undisclosed customer. The system is in production for Australia, Qatar, Hungary and Ukraine. NASAMS is in use with both Armies and Air Forces around the world. In addition Poland, Greece and Turkey operate the Kongsberg Command and Control solution for various weapon systems. In April 2023 the Ukrainian Air Force said that NASAMS have destroyed more than 100 enemy missiles and drones.
