On August 4 the armed forces of North Korea – the Korean People’s Army – made an unprecedented display of ballistic missile firepower, with a ceremony marking the commissioning of 250 launchers for the KN-24 short range tactical missile system. Each launcher carries four missiles, for a total arsenal of 1,000.
The ceremony was attended by party, government and military officials, as well as defense scientists, technicians, munitions industry workers and “persons of merits in Pyongyang Municipality.” Commanding officers and other service members, presumably from associated missile units, were also confirmed to be in attendance.
The ceremony saw the missile systems handed over to Korean People’s Army “frontline units” near the Demilitarized Zone, where the bulk of the country’s ground forces have been deployed for decades.
By far the most outstanding aspect of the ceremony was the sheer number of ballistic missiles on display, which represented one of the largest displays in history not just in North Korea, but anywhere in the world. Just three months prior the release of footage showing 396 KN-24 missiles in a warehouse was considered unprecedented, and was widely interpreted as an indication of a new and tremendously greater industrial capacity. The commissioning in a single day of an arsenal over 250 percent as large provides a much stronger indication of this.
The KN-24 was first confirmed to have been test launched on August 10, 2019, with large-scale serial production thought to have begun several months afterwards at the earliest. That means the KN-24 has been in full production for under five years. Thus a current production rate of well over 200 missiles per year, and possibly closer to or exceeding 300 missiles, would be needed to equip all the launchers seen.
This is aside from the fact that each launcher for such systems is usually supported by a reloader vehicle to allow additional missiles from storage to be deployed, meaning for each missile seen on a launcher there are usually at least two or three missiles in service. Thus launchers accommodating 1,000 missiles would usually indicate an arsenal of at the very least 2,000-3,000, in this case signaling production capacity of well over 400 per year. However, it is also possible that the launchers were put into service before these additional stockpiles for reloading were available and annual production has remained at under 300 missiles – still a tremendous quantity.
It is also notable that the missiles displayed at the ceremony were far from representative of the sum total of all KN-24 production. The missiles are known to be deployed from other kinds of launch vehicles than the six wheelers seen at the ceremony – most notably from 12-wheeled tracked launchers designed to operate from difficult terrain.
This is aside from the fact that KN-24 missiles have been fired in considerable numbers both in tests and as shows of force. Additional missiles have also been exported to Russia and utilized in combat in Ukraine. The fact that North Korea can still commission 1,000 of the new missiles on a single launch vehicle type, and likely has produced many more KN-24s, thus represents a truly staggering industrial achievement – one far beyond the industrial constraints that the country was previously thought to have.
To place the production of 1,000 ballistic missiles from a single class in under five years in perspective, no other ballistic missile class in the world is thought to be in production in such numbers. The lone exception is the Russian 9K720 used by the Iskander-M system, albeit only because of a surge in production from 2022 to meet wartime needs. North Korea is producing in peacetime.
North Korean state media reports and statements by officials in attendance at the ceremony thus particularly emphasized the significance of manufacturing efforts required to produce the large number of ballistic missiles and associated launch vehicles for service. The state run Korean Central News Agency reported on the “heroic struggle of the munitions workers”:
The workers of major munitions enterprises, fully awakened to the sense of their important mission that the increased production of military hardware precisely means the safeguarding of the national dignity and sovereignty, have waged an intensive struggle to successfully attain the important munitions production goals set forth at the Eighth Party Congress and the enlarged meetings of the Central Military Commission of the WPK. Thus, they have performed the proud feats of serially producing in a short span of time main strike military hardware indispensable for implementing the Party’s military strategic idea.
At the ceremony, Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee Secretary Jo Chun Ryong stated that “the new-type tactical ballistic missile weapon system newly developed and produced by munitions industrial workers is a powerful up-to-date tactical attack weapon.”
The commissioning ceremony for new KN-24 systems follows multiple prior indications that North Korea’s production capacity for ballistic missiles has indeed grown very significantly – albeit none of them were anywhere near the production scale of the KN-24. A mass display of 12 Hwasong-17 intercontinental range ballistic missiles on February 8, 2023 raised serious concerns among Western analysts regarding their ability to overwhelm American missile defenses – a worry that only worsened after flight testing of a multiple independent reentry vehicle for the missiles began in late June.
Footage in January 2023 showed 28 Hwasong-12s intermediate range “Guam Killer” missiles at the Thaesong Machine Factory, with this number of such large missiles considered very significant, particularly for such a small country. Where these displays were significant by North Korean standards, but still dwarfed by the arsenals of larger powers such as China and Russia, the KN-24 display is significant by global standards.
Despite benefiting from a highly educated and skilled workforce with negligible labor costs, and from state-owned supply chains that can manufacture very cheaply, the production of solid-fueled missiles with precision guidance is still far from cheap. This makes the commissioning in a short period well over 1,000 missiles from a single class particularly notable for what it implies about North Korea’s economy.
Despite being more sophisticated and thus costly to produce, the KN-24 is in production on a scale several times as high as the Scud-type and Tochka-type missiles that preceded it in the country’s arsenal, even though North Korean industry’s focus on such short-ranged ballistic missile types has decreased significantly over time as a much more diverse range of missiles entered service. The commissioning is one of a growing number of indicators that the size of North Korea’s economy and industrial base and their growth rates have been seriously underestimated. Such indicators in the civilian economy have ranged from the country’s construction boom, to the large increase seen in the variety of products on display at trade shows, and North Korea’s unexpected resilience when foreign trade ties were severed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The military implications of the commissioning and forward deployment of launchers accommodating 1,000 new KN-24 missiles are significant. These compact missiles’ use of solid fuel composites significantly shortens their launch times, making them particularly difficult to seek and destroy before firing their payloads.
The missiles are also well optimized to evade enemy air defenses by maneuvering along an irregular trajectory, much like the larger KN-23. The United States’ Congressional Research Service referred to the KN-24 as a system that “demonstrates the guidance system and in-flight maneuverability to achieve precision strikes.” Alongside the KN-23 and the KN-25 rocket artillery system, it was referred to as one of three systems that “appear to be directed at developing capabilities to defeat or degrade the effectiveness of missile defenses deployed in the region: Patriot, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD).”
Observing signs of an expanded production scale of the KN-24 in January, an assessment published by the Army Recognition Group similarly noted regarding the system’s capabilities:
One of the key features of the KN-24 is its ability to maneuver in flight, allowing it to fly on non-parabolic trajectories. This capability makes the missile more challenging to intercept as it complicates the prediction of its flight path for missile defense systems. In addition, the missile has shown enhanced accuracy in its test firings, including the capability to strike a target as small as a 100-meter-wide island.
The fact that the KN-24 can also be used for delivery of non-conventional warheads, including the new Hwasan-31 tactical nuclear warhead, and possibly a range of chemical weapons that North Korea is speculated to field, makes them particularly potent.
North Korean forces forward deployed near the DMZ benefit from a particularly dense network of underground fortifications, allowing systems such as the road mobile KN-24 to deploy safely underground, emerging to fire on its target before again withdrawing. In January I detailed how the wartime importance of this capability has been demonstrated by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which has used a North Korean-built underground fortification network in Southern Lebanon during hostilities with Israel.
A further and more obvious benefit of forward deployment is that it allows the systems, which have limited estimated ranges of 410 km, to reach targets deep into South Korean territory. The systems have a key role in nullifying many of the U.S. and South Korea’s conventional advantages, in particular their air power through the ability to strike bases hosting aviation assets.
Beyond the Korean Peninsula, North Korea’s massive capacity for production of sophisticated tactical missiles serves to seriously shift the balance of power against the interests of its adversaries in the Western world across multiple theaters. This is currently particularly significant in Eastern Europe, where Russia’s arsenal of Iskander-M missiles, bolstered from late 2023 by KN-23s and KN-24s, has played an increasingly central role in hostilities against Ukraine and its Western allies.
North Korea has long fielded by far the world’s largest artillery force, with 412 percent as much towed and self propelled artillery as the Russian Army at a conservative estimate and 625 percent as much rocket artillery. The KN-24 display, however, provides one of several indications that it could soon boast at least parity with, if not a significant advantage over, Russian industry in terms of its productive capacity for tactical missiles as well as the size of its arsenal.
With such a standing, the implications of North Korean missile exports to Russia are significantly greater. The potential implications for other theaters, most notably the Middle East, are also highly significant, with escalated tensions expected to raise a number of parties’ interest in acquisitions – many of which, such as Syria, Egypt, and Hezbollah, are long-standing clients for North Korean tactical missiles or other equipment.