Euronaval 2026: France to procure MBDA's Naval Cruise Missile Mk 2 for deep strike

MBDA's Land Cruise Missile/Naval Cruise Missile (LCM/NCM) Mk 2 (designated the MdCN - Missile de Croisière Navale Mk2 in French service), displayed at the Euronaval 2026. (Janes/Tristan Sauer)

France's Directorate General of Armaments (DGA) announced plans to sign a procurement contract for the Land Cruise Missile/Naval Cruise Missile (LCM/NCM) Mk 2 (designated the MdCN - Missile de Croisière Navale Mk2 in French service), at the Euronaval 2026 exhibition, held in Paris between 3-6 November. Deliveries under this agreement are scheduled to begin in 2030.

The NCM Mk 2 includes several upgrades over the Mk 1 variant, designed to improve performance with regards to survivability, effective range, and lethality, MBDA's vice president of commerce and business development, Sophie Bourdais, told Janes during a media briefing. The NCM Mk 2 has been hardened against GNSS (global navigation satellite system jamming. MBDA expanded the NCM Mk 2's library of flight paths and updated both the electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) sensors to facilitate lower altitude trajectories, Bourdais said.

The LCM/NCM Mk 2 has been programmed to communicate with other MBDA smart munitions including the low-cost Deluge one-way effector and the Stratus missile types, Bourdais said. This capability gives operators more versatility in conducting strikes against various target profiles, enabling tactics such as saturation attacks and decoy strikes by combining NCM/LCM Mk 2 with additional effectors, Bourdais added.