US Air Force Awards Kongsberg $240.9M Contract for F-35 Joint Strike Missiles

The U.S. Air Force has finalized a $240.9 million production contract with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace of Norway, covering a second production lot of the Joint Strike Missile (JSM), catalogued in U.S. service as the AGM-184, for the F-35 Lightning II fleet.

JSM is a low-signature, internally carried precision weapon built specifically to fit within the F-35’s internal weapons bay, preserving the aircraft’s stealth characteristics rather than forcing a trade-off between payload and detectability. The missile is dual-role, able to strike both ships and land targets from stand-off distance.

Manufacturing under the new award will run out of Norway through November 2028. Integration efforts span all three American F-35 variants: the Air Force’s conventional F-35A, the carrier-launched F-35C flown by the Navy, and the short-takeoff, vertical-landing F-35B used by the Marine Corps.

Program officials frame the missile as closing a narrow but important capability gap. Before JSM, the F-35’s internal bay had no long-range option for hitting ships or hardened ground targets; carrying an external weapon large enough to do the job would have erased the aircraft’s low-observable profile. JSM lets pilots engage well-defended targets from outside the reach of many integrated air defense systems.

Kongsberg has been supplying JSM to Norway’s own F-35A squadrons since 2025, and interest has since spread to other F-35 operators, including a standalone order placed by Japan. The new U.S. Air Force contract signals a deepening American reliance on a weapon developed and produced by a partner-nation firm, a departure from the historical preference for domestically sourced munitions.

The deal also illustrates how thoroughly transatlantic the F-35’s weapons ecosystem has become. Lockheed Martin builds the airframe, but the jet’s strike options are increasingly assembled from suppliers spread across the program’s international partner base, with Norway’s missile now one of the more mature non-U.S. entries for internal carriage.

Analysts tracking the F-35 supply chain note that as the worldwide fleet has passed the 1,000-aircraft mark, demand for compatible precision munitions has grown in step — a pattern likely to generate further JSM orders in coming years from both the United States and allied air forces.

Source: Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace / U.S. Department of Defense contract announcements.