Poland permanently closes the Baltic Sea to Russia and orders additional NSM batteries
And a nice bonus of Naval Strike Missile is that they can also hit ground targets
The Polish Ministry of Defense intends to strengthen its coastal defense and has announced its intention to purchase additional Naval Strike Missile systems from Konsberg. For Warsaw, this will be a logical continuation of the increase in the number of these tanks in service, which were ordered in batches in 2012 and 2014.
According to the Defense24 specialized publication, the intention is to create two new coastal missile formations at once. Given that in April of this year, unofficial information emerged about Warsaw’s intention to acquire another division, we are now talking about at least doubling the plans, and eventually multiplying Poland’s anti-ship capabilities.
In general, the NSM can now be considered the most advanced anti-ship missile in the world, which has even forced the United States to start installing it on its ships instead of its own Harpoon.
This missile is made using stealth technology, has rather tiny dimensions and weighs 350 kg (another 50 kg is the weight of the launcher), while the warhead weighs 120 kg. The range of the missile is about 200-250 km.
A thermal imaging homing head is responsible for targeting, which provides another feature of this missile – the possibility of a completely undetectable strike. Unlike a traditional radar homing head, a thermal imaging sensor is a passive sensor.
This homing head also provided another advantage of the NSM – the ability to strike ground targets. At least this is declared for its airborne version of the Joint Strike Missile.
This way, Poland will obviously be able not only to secure its coastline on its own, not only to completely block the Baltic Sea, since the distance from the Polish to the Swedish coast is about 180 km, but also to get a land-based cruise missile to hit particularly important targets.
