British Royal Navy’s HMS Somerset fires NSM Naval Strike Missile in first-ever test in Norway.

The British Royal Navy confirmed HMS Somerset Type 23 frigate fired the Naval Strike Missile for the first time during a NATO drill in Norway’s Arctic region. The test strengthens Britain’s naval strike power and signals deeper defense cooperation with allies.

The British Royal Navy confirmed on September 29, 2025, that the Plymouth-based Type 23 frigate HMS Somerset launched the Naval Strike Missile (NSM) for the first time during Exercise Aegir 25 in Andøya, Norway. Conducted with Norwegian and Polish forces, the Arctic live-fire marked a historic step in Britain’s adoption of advanced maritime strike weapons. The milestone underscores the U.K.’s growing naval capabilities and its role in NATO’s northern defense posture.
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British Royal Navy frigate HMS Somerset launches a Naval Strike Missile (NSM) during Exercise Aegir 25 at Norway’s Andøya test range, marking the Royal Navy’s first live firing of the advanced sea-skimming weapon system. (Picture source: British Royal Navy).

Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile is a fifth-generation anti-ship and land-attack cruise missile designed for survivability against layered defenses: it flies at very low altitude, remains entirely passive through most of the kill chain, and executes high-G terminal maneuvers before impact. The manufacturer lists a high-subsonic speed, a weight of 407 kg, and a stated range of more than 300 km for the latest variants, with an imaging infrared seeker and autonomous target recognition to discriminate and lock onto the intended ship even among clutter and decoys. Raytheon, Kongsberg’s U.S. co-production partner, emphasizes the missile’s sea-skimming profile, advanced seeker and a 500-pound-class warhead with programmable fuze options for optimal terminal effects.

HMS Somerset’s firing took place in early September during Aegir 25, coordinated with Norwegian and Polish units operating land-based NSM launchers. The weapon’s Royal Navy moniker and the pace of ship fits, with HMS Portland and HMS Richmond among the frigates already carrying canistered launchers. The Ministry of Defence previously outlined the rollout path, confirming in December 2024 that HMS Portland became the second Royal Navy frigate fitted with the new missiles after HMS Somerset, with the remainder of the Type 23 and Type 45 fleet slated to follow. That official update highlighted the NSM’s near-Mach flight profile, sea-skimming approach and range beyond 100 miles, and described integration work conducted with Kongsberg and Defence Equipment & Support at Norway’s Haakonsvern naval base. Those statements foreshadowed the live shot now achieved by Somerset.

HMS Somerset (F82) is a Type 23 Duke-class frigate commissioned into the British Royal Navy in 1996. Originally designed for anti-submarine warfare, the frigate has undergone a series of upgrades to enhance its capabilities across multiple domains, including surface strike and air defence. Armed with advanced sonar, radar, and combat systems, and supported by a Merlin or Wildcat helicopter, HMS Somerset plays a central role in NATO maritime operations and high-readiness deployments. With a crew of approximately 185 personnel and homeported in Devonport, Somerset now becomes the first British warship to successfully test-fire the Naval Strike Missile.

The NSM missile uses GPS-aided inertial navigation to cruise, updates altitude with a laser altimeter to hug the sea surface, and can employ terrain-following over land before handing to a high-resolution imaging infrared seeker for terminal homing. Kongsberg’s documentation stresses the missile’s composite low-observable airframe and sophisticated autonomous target recognition, raising the bar for survivability against modern shipboard electronic countermeasures and point defenses. This passive approach denies defenders the early warning cues provided by active radar seekers and reduces exposure to radar-homing counterfire.

In terms of lethality, open manufacturer sources place the warhead in the roughly 120 to 500-pound class depending on descriptor and publication, but both partners position NSM as a precise, hardened target-setter rather than a blunt-force weapon. The weapon is designed to defeat medium warships and critical topside aim points, and its programmable fuze and terminal profiles allow tailored effects against hull, mission systems, or shore-based targets. Raytheon highlights that NSM also supports limited land-attack against defended coastal nodes, a useful interim ability as the UK waits for its heavier Franco-British Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon to enter service on next-generation frigates.

The Somerset shot reestablishes a credible over-the-horizon surface strike for Royal Navy escorts after Harpoon’s retirement created a gap in long-range anti-ship capability. Paired with the missile’s coastal-defense batteries fielded by regional allies, NSM creates a distributed, networked threat matrix at sea and ashore. The missile’s passive guidance and low signature are particularly suited to the complex electromagnetic environment of the Norwegian and Barents Seas, where clutter, geography and electronic warfare compress engagement timelines and favor weapons that shorten the defender’s detection and reaction window. The system’s ability to prosecute land targets also gives UK commanders a flexible tool for denying choke points, disabling forward operating sites, or striking maritime logistics nodes ringing the High North.

The tactical lesson from Aegir 25 is interoperability: Norway, Poland and the UK rehearsed a common kill chain that can mix ship, shore and air sensors to hand off a firing solution to NSM shooters on different platforms. That architecture is exactly what the missile was built to exploit. The Royal Navy’s own roadmap suggests NSM will serve as the interim punch until the heavyweight FC/ASW family, sometimes referred to as Stratus in UK documents, arrives on Type 26 and Type 31 in the 2030s. In the near term, NATO can mass credible anti-ship fires quickly, from multiple axes, without presenting the radar signatures or datalink chatter that defenders rely on to cue hard-kill interceptors.

The test lands in a challenging Arctic security climate, where Russia’s Northern Fleet remains the centerpiece of Moscow’s second-strike posture and where NATO’s sea lines between North America and Europe run closest to the contested High North. The UK Defence Journal’s account places the shot at Andøya, a range long used by Norway to hone allied high-latitude operations, and follows a year in which London has pushed visible naval contributions to NATO’s northern deterrence posture. British officials and industry partners in separate reporting have also framed NSM as a symbol of UK-Norwegian defense industrial alignment at pace, an assessment echoed in contemporaneous national press coverage of the program’s rapid fit on Royal Navy hulls.

For the Royal Navy, the significance is twofold. First, this firing validates the integration work on legacy Type 23 combat systems and clears the way for broader fleet issue, including to Type 45 destroyers that must defend carrier groups while holding opposing surface combatants at risk. Second, it buys time and deterrence: with a modern, sea-skimming missile now proven from a British deck in the Arctic, London can credibly contribute to allied sea denial in the North Atlantic arc while maturing its heavier strike programs for the next decade’s fleet.