Denmark considers to reactivate its coastal defence with NSM batteries
Royal Danish Navy’s truck-mounted Harpoon launcher, part of a Mobile Missile Battery.
Coastal anti-ship missile batteries were found in several countries during and in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, but with the general reduction of the armed forces following the end of the Cold War, these were in many cases retired and not replaced. With the accelerating rearmament, it is unsurprising to see the return of the systems into fashion once more.
One country which did operate a small number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles was Denmark, which sported quadruple-launchers mounted on 4-axis Scania-trucks. These were Harpoon-launchers taken from the two Peder Skram-class frigates when they were decommissioned in 1990. As such, the unit consisted of two batteries each with two launchers, and was allocated to the mobile coastal base unit, MOBA, until eventually being disbanded together with their parent unit in 2003. That was not the end of Danish mobile Harpoon-batteries, however, as with the outbreak of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Denmark used their experience of the concept to create and donate a mobile Harpoon-battery to Ukraine, something that has been described as Denmark’s “most important donation” to the country, and is one of the key components of the Ukrainian coastal defences for Odesa and its surroundings.
With the recently announced significant investment in the Royal Danish Navy, it comes as no surprise that one of the capabilities being looked at is the reactivation of a coastal missile defence. Danish newspaper Berlingske now reports that the country is indeed set on acquiring a mobile solution with the Norwegian Kongsberg NSM anti-ship missile.
To Naval News, the Danish procurement agency DALO could not confirm the reporting, stating that the final details of the fleet plan is still under negotiation, and that the plan is expected to be completed after Easter. “DALO can neither confirm nor deny information from leaked drafts of the final agreement.”
The reporting does however seem like a probable scenario. As mentioned, Denmark has experience of similar systems, and the experiences from the War in Ukraine also has been reported in Danish media as having highlighted the importance and capabilities of such systems in a littoral coastal defence scenario – something that is key for Denmark which controls the narrow and winding inlets to the Baltic Sea. The NSM has also already been chosen as the replacement for the ship-based Harpoons of the Danish Navy, making it the logical system for the land-based solutions as well. Further increasing the likelihood of the system is the fact that the NSM is also already in widespread use from coastal systems, including both the USMC NMESIS program and the Polish Maritime Missile Units, where the plan is to have dozens of truck-mounted missiles grouped into a number of batteries. In particular the Polish missile units can be assumed to work as a template being studied by the Danes to get an appreciation for how a Danish modern NSM battery could look.
© 2025, GDC. © GDC and www.globaldefensecorp.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to www.globaldefensecorp.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
