Nammo CEO warns European rupture with US risks 10-year capability gap

RAUFOSS, Norway — The CEO of one of Europe’s major ammunition and rocket motor engine producers has warned that any potential cutting off of industrial cooperation with the US risks European allies suffering a loss of capability that could take up to a decade to replace.

“If we cannot deliver AMRAAM rocket motors to Raytheon, well, none of the European F-35s” will have the weapons equipped on the fifth-generation fighter jet, Morten Brandtzæg, CEO of Norwegian manufacturer NAMMO, said Wednesday during the opening of the company’s multipurpose symposium here.

American AMRAAM-maker Raytheon is heavily dependent on NAMMO-supplied rocket motor engines for the air-to-air missile, and Brandtzæg made clear that destroying such a supply chain would be counterproductive. It would take Europe “five to ten years” to replace equivalent capabilities, he added.

“We don’t have that” amount of time, he said, appearing to refer to Russia’s war in Ukraine. “This industrial base among our allies is already very interconnected, so we cannot break it up,” he argued.

Relations between the US and Europe have been extraordinarily tense during President Donald Trump’s second administration, as Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over the Danish territory of Greenland and in 2024 suggested the US may not uphold NATO’s Article V commitment to collective defense for countries who did not “pay” enough into the alliance. European leaders, in turn, have publicly called on the continent to boost its domestic defense industrial base to be less reliant on the US.

But speaking to Breaking Defense and other trade media on Tuesday ahead of the symposium, Brandtzæg said that “short term [political] turbulence” cannot be allowed to ruin decades worth of industrial co-operation between Europe and the US.

“It’s not for this industry to start running their own politics. … I support a strong cooperation among allied countries, and that includes every single NATO country and a few other countries as well,” he explained. “I think that is the way we build deterrence.”

As for Nammo, Brandtzæg said, “We are ready to step in whenever needed to do even more,” for US-based solid rocket motor production. “We have the technology and we have proven the process to work, so we are ready to step up,” including additional investment in Nammo’s Perry, Fla. production site. “We are in constant talks to help ramp up to produce more rocket motors, for missiles used by the US government,” he said.

Closer to home, Nammo recently stood up a third rocket motor production line at Raufoss, with Brandtzæg identifying additional lines as a long term target.

“We are ramping up everywhere, and we foresee to double the size of Raufoss” by 2032, he told reporters.

In the earlier stages of the Ukraine conflict, Brandtzæg called on governments to issue longer-term contracts for 155mm ammunition, on the basis that Western industry is involved in a war of capacity with Moscow.

Nammo is in “a better place” than last year, but progress is not “sufficient yet” in terms of increasing production of the shells, he told reporters.

At the symposium he went further, saying that restocking of 155mm supplies for European armies is “not there yet” as  “everything we are producing is going” to Ukraine. (Breaking Defense accepted travel and accommodation for the trip from Nammo.)

Nammo’s immediate plan to scale up 155mm production rests with a new, state of the art facility set to open at the end of the year and production launching in 2027.

At a cost of $180 million, it takes between “two to three years to build it and the output is just enough for seven days in Ukraine,” said Brandtzæg, of the new site.

Jack Watling, senior research fellow for applied military sciences at the British-based Royal United Services Institute think tank, said that beyond industrial planning, if Russia’s war was to stretch into a conflict directly with NATO, the “biggest challenge” for the alliance will be how to keep ammunition flowing from production to the frontline. There’s also the matter of the raw materials required.

Speaking at the symposium today, he argued against Western governments signing off new 155mm orders unless production of critical ingredients like nitrocellulose can be increased and industry can demonstrate it can preserve nitric acid supplies. 

Although dependence on raw materials critical to 155mm artillery shell supplies has troubled industry throughout the Ukraine war, the situation is increasingly concerning because of infrastructure hurdles, explained Watling. 

“Unless we have the high explosive to be able to go into the shelves, simply placing more orders for 155 is not going to resolve our issues because, again, if I want to set up a propellant factory somewhere, then the planning overhead [costs] alone to get permission to start building is certainly, in the UK…. [is such that it] risks making the project unprofitable.”