Korea & The Changing Global Arms Market - Inside Korea's Biggest Defence Exhibition (KADEX)
Alright, so today everyone, for something a little bit different we've got a bit of a Perun road trip. So we'll just pause here for a quick flyby. Given it is 8 aircraft, I reckon this is the Korean Air Force 53rd Air Demonstration Group. I have to say this is a pretty good welcome, but we've got a lot to cover today, so let's get these slides started.
In many ways the war in Ukraine has driven a massive shake-up in the global defence industry. That has left some countries used to decades of the peace dividend to rush to try and undo years of under-investment and get strapped again as quickly as possible. But for the Republic of Korea, ever stuck with its "unique" northern neighbour, the peace dividend has never really been a thing. Korea's already active arms factories have helped lift it into a consistent top 10 arms exporter, with a stated goal of making it to number 4 by 2027.
And with the Korea Army International Defence Industry Exhibition (or KADEX) bringing together tens of thousands of attendees, hundreds of companies, and enough equipment to fight off an alien invasion, I had an opportunity to go and talk to companies and military personnel to get an idea of how they see the future of warfare up close. On one occasion at least, a little bit too close as we were watching some K2 tanks practice for a demonstration not expecting the tanks to actually fire off their smoke grenades during a practice session. If you listen closely, you'll actually hear the little bits of casing ping off the fence and ground here.
And yeah, at this point I decided that maybe a couple of steps back from the fence might be a good idea. So with that demonstrating this episode is a result of a little more hands-on activity than normal, today we are going to look at what this expo tells us about the way the global arms market might be changing, and some of the new technologies and systems that companies are looking to introduce as a result. We'll start with an introduction to the event that I attended, and then work our way through some of the technologies and themes I saw there.
Including developments in drones, armour, automation, fires, lessons from Ukraine, and a couple of other interesting observations besides. OK, so a really quick background up front: how do defence exhibitions work in general and what's the deal with KADEX specifically? To those of you who haven't been to one before, defence expos basically serve the same function as trade shows do in a lot of other industries. They give companies an opportunity to show off current and future equipment and concepts, their product offering so to speak, build connections, negotiate, announce deals, etc. Often they are an opportunity for industry and nations to bring out their big guns, literally or figuratively, and try to pitch to the market why they should come to them. They are very much generally also not just about big weapon systems and munitions.
They are also an opportunity for firms that build subsystems, components, or provide specialised services. So you'll often see a lot of small and medium enterprises present that are critical to the overall supply chain. And to balance that commercial side and potential sensitivities with public interest, sometimes you'll see these things split into two sets of days. The industry days where it's just government, military and industry attending. And then public days where everyone can come in and watch the flybys and take pictures with the equipment, but without some of the more corporate-focused elements.
Little Timmy probably wants to take a picture on the Patriot battery, not get quoted an indicative price for one. The exhibition I'm giving you a look at today is the largest one in Korea. As a Korean event the core of the focus was naturally on Korean firms, so most of what I'll be showing you today are naturally Korean systems.
This is one of the core advantages of holding your own exhibition, it's logistically easier for your firms to get there. And given the logistics of moving heavy equipment like main battle tanks, a local event might be the best opportunity to show them off. That said, there was a strong international presence here. The list of attendees included a wide range of countries from the United States and Brazil to Nigeria, Uzbekistan and Singapore. In what I am sure is a massive surprise to all of you however, it did not include North Korea, Russia or the People's Republic of China. The "where" of the expo I think gives a quick insight into the strategic geography of the ROK.
If you are going to Korea and you want to immerse yourself in K-pop and explore a mega city, you are probably going to the capital city of Seoul. But if you want to interact with a lot of the military establishment, you are probably going to be heading a few hours further south. Down closer to the city of Daejeon, and notably out of range of the vast majority of North Korean artillery systems, you'll find Gyeryongdae, the place where KADEX was held. In a roughly a 30 minute radius of this hopefully artillery-free zone you not only have the headquarters of all three military branches, you have the National Defence University, support, training and logistics commands, research institutions, training centres, and defence industrial facilities. Compared to some other events of this kind, it's long on nearby military infrastructure and short on proximate inner city universities. Now finally before we get into some of what was shown off at KADEX, a few quick notes about why I was there.
This was a little bit different for me because while I've obviously attended exhibitions before, this was my first time wearing a badge that said "media" rather than government or industry or whatever. Well in advance of the event, the organisers reached out to a number of online content creators to ask whether or not we'd be interested in attending. I took them up on the offer, so for the sake of transparency a couple of quick disclaimers. I paid a majority of my own cost for the trip, but they did provide partial contributions towards travel, accommodation, food and incidentals. They didn't ask for full editorial control, they didn't get to see this video in advance. They did ask for a guarantee I'd actually do an episode on the event, which I think is fair enough.
But for me the most important things they provided were A) access, including to the event before it had actually started. I'll actually roll some footage from the set-up stage here while we're talking. They also provided assistance setting up interviews, and a translator.
Obviously major companies in particular will bring a lot of people who can speak English and other languages to events like this one. Although trying to engage solely in English might increase the odds that what you get back in return is a series of potentially very well practiced English language responses from the sales brochure. But I found it much easier to engage with Korean military personnel and technical experts and have technical conversations with the assistance of a translator. And while we did have some fun moments, for example I don't think that terms like thermobaric or Circular Error Probable appear particularly often in Korean English language courses when your background is doing humanitarian work with the United Nations. We always got there in the end, and a lot of what I'm going to be able to tell you today owes a lot to her, so I can't thank her enough. OK, so let's start with major observation one from the event, and it was clear even before all the exhibits had finished being set up.
And that is that compared to 2021, or even much of 2022, small drones are absolutely everywhere. It is very clear at this point that the war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed the market for small UAS. And while Ukraine absolutely remains the focal point for a lot of development and testing in that area, a lot of Korean and international firms seem to be betting that Pandora's box isn't going to be closed any time soon. There were small squad level ISR and drop drones, like this one with a two shot payload. Rotary cargo drones intends to support battlefield resupply and logistics. There were a few rotor drones equipped with guns or missiles instead of droppable munitions, intended to engage targets from a longer distance.
And a huge number of other UAS, including various VTOL designs. Then as part of this, there was also a lot of activity in the loitering munition space. Something we tend to associate with things like the Russian Lancet. And here you really have the full spectrum, starting with existing loitering munition systems, many of which you might recognise. I've got an image of the AeroVironment Switchblade 300 and 600 there on the right.
With the 300 being mostly an anti-infantry loitering munition, and the 600 being more of an anti-armour system. Then you had established producers that were also showing off new or relatively new systems. WB Group for example, which is the Polish firm responsible for the Warmate loitering munition, you can see one on the wall there, were also showing off a model of that larger system there, the Warmate 5. Which we really only started to see this year and makes a number of significant changes from the Warmate 1.
Including moving from a 1 kilo to a 5 kilogram warhead. In that sense it kind of mirrors the development track we've seen ZALA in Russia take with the Lancet, moving slowly from the 1 kilogram payload in the Lancet-1, up to 3 kilos with the Lancet-3 and likely heavier again in future versions. The obvious drawback here is that you have to build a larger, more expensive system to accommodate that bigger bang. But experience in Ukraine does seem to be indicating that there can be a lot of value in having those larger payload options. Interestingly, WB Group was also at the centre of one of the major deals we saw signed at KADEX, with the Korean government committing to purchase a number of those Polish Warmate loitering munitions.
In recent years we've seen a lot of arms sale and technology transfer activity going from Korea to Poland. This is one example, albeit a relatively small one, of that flow also going in the other direction. But what is very clear is that the number of companies looking to market products in this space is rapidly increasing, and that includes Korean firms. What you are seeing on the right there is a Korean Switchblade-esque loitering munition concept. And this wasn't the only systems category where Korean industry appears to be working towards having their own domestic analogue.
What you're seeing on the right there is a Korean loitering munition concept, the KUS-LM. And when I jokingly suggested that this seemed a little bit like a "we have Shahed at home" situation, one of the Koreans I was with politely corrected me, suggesting that this wasn't a Shahed, it was a better Shahed. And talking a little further, it does appear that the Korean objective with systems like this might be to try and remain cost competitive while also delivering performance improvements in areas like accuracy compared to things like the Iranian system. This is a system conceived much more for battlefield use against point targets, as opposed to as part of a strategic bombing campaign. In many cases with some of the systems I looked at, the essential marketing pitch here seems to go something like this.
Take a proven successful system concept, and then design a Korean version which can then offer NATO or Western-style performance characteristics at slightly less than European or US prices. There are a few other interesting things that really stood out during the interview process, some of which I can repeat here, some of which I can't. But two that I can dwell on are the approach to development and deployment, and also the prospect of future competition.
In terms of some of the Korean drone projects, it really felt like there might be a little bit of development heresy going on, but potentially in a very good way. To greatly oversimplify: in a lot of development procurement efforts elements like your doctrine, your concept of operations, enter into it quite early in the process. And then you work your way forward to specific requirements and eventually a final piece of equipment. The US Air Force doesn't buy a new air-to-air missile and then try and figure out how to fight with it, they figure out how they want to fight first, and then go to industry to try and get a missile that enables them to fight that way. Talking to one of the Korean military personnel testing and operating some of these drone systems however, it sometimes felt like the Korean Army had somewhat flipped the script on that process. As far as he was aware, questions like how exactly will the system be used, what parts of the force might control it, what sort of numbers might they be operated in were questions to be answered later, partly through testing, suggesting a slightly different development process.
You see over there that someone is using drones very successfully, so you want to learn about this new drone thing, so quickly get or build some that look interesting, and then give them to capable people to test and experiment with. Allowing the tactics and doctrines to emerge from the testing process, rather than designing a piece of equipment from the start to fit a given set of tactics. That approach potentially requires you to take some risk, acquire some systems you may actually never end up using. But in some cases, especially with new and accessible technologies like drone systems, it might enable you to learn and adapt more quickly.
I also find it somewhat reminiscent of the approach that Milrem Robotics for example, has taken in the development of their ground combat drone systems. And I think it's fair to say they have ended up taking a pretty dominant place in the mid-sized UGV market. The other point to flag is I think there is some awareness out there that this massive growth in the number of drone offerings in the market and the number of companies offering to sell these products, can't really last forever. Eventually some designs and some producers are going to win greater market share than others, enabling them to access economies of scale and then be even more competitive in follow-on contracts. Even in Ukraine where wartime demands are absolutely massive, we have already seen this process of consolidation start to play out.
As one industry guy there put it to me, eventually they expect more or less everyone to at least get the basic drone platforms themselves right. Some might be a little bit faster than others, some might be a little bit cheaper than others, but the basic technology itself isn't that hard. So what you might want to try and win in this market is something more than just the basic drone airframe itself. And often it seems to go back to whatever the original DNA of that company now producing drones is. Poongsan for example, is a major Korean defence firm that had a lot of small UAS and loitering munition concepts on display.
But they are not originally a drone manufacturing firm, their claim to fame in the defence base is as a munitions manufacturer. They produce everything from small arms ammunition up to tank rounds and 155mm shells. So one of their reps put it to me that their competitive advantage in the drone space would be that they really understood munitions. And to me that makes a certain degree of intuitive sense, one of the main ways we've seen both Russia and Ukraine trying to increase the effectiveness of their drone systems in that conflict is by improving the payload. Poongsan had an entire wall display showing off different drone munitions offerings.
And in some cases had the damaged bits of metal on display that had been used in the testing process to demonstrate armour penetration. Of course that's not to say that other producers dismissed the importance of a good warhead. As you can see on the right there, the Poles were showing off some of their in-house produced warheads for the Warmate 1 and the Warmate 5.
But when I had a long conversation with one of their reps, they suggested something very different as one of their main drivers of future competitive advantage. Their corporate DNA includes more things like communications, and command & control systems. And so from their point of view the focus might be on the software and the broader system. They already advertise an autonomous targeting solution for example. So if a Warmate loses connection with its operator during the terminal approach phase, the weapon can still attempt to attack the target. The war in Ukraine has put a lot of focus on the potential value of things like autonomy in drone systems and loitering munitions.
And so talking to WB, their vision for positioning their systems going forward includes not just iterating the basic design of the system, but also the software and the autonomy. Although once again, they were far from the only firm talking about the potential value of more autonomy. As well as other software and network driven features like drone swarming, where a single operator can control a flock, so to speak, of multiple systems. A lot of firms appear to be quite aware of the potential value of a lot of these capabilities and technologies.
What differs between them is where they appear to put the emphasis, and also potentially where their relative areas of specialisation and advantage lie. There's also another personal observation I want to make here. And that's that beyond just raw investment and engineering talent, especially when you are talking about things like autonomy being built into drones and munitions, there might be another factor which can shape which companies can progress how quickly. And that's access to large volumes of good quality engagement data.
If you are trying to train a system for effective target recognition or guidance, you don't just need lots and lots of compute, you also need data to train it on. And while there might be ways for some companies to get around or mitigate the issue, the largest collections of drone and loitering munition engagement data in the world at the moment belong to Russia and Ukraine. That means if you are a company that are able to supply your system to Ukraine and get the engagement data back, as well potentially as other engagement data from other systems in Ukrainian or Russian inventory, you might have a much better time teaching your system how to recognise a vehicle with a cope cage or under camouflage, or how to engage under various battlefield conditions, than a company that doesn't. I'll leave it to the audience to think about which international firms or actors might be getting access to the Russian data. But going forward, I think it'll be interesting to see what sort of value the Poles or the Americans get from supplying their systems into Ukraine and potentially getting access to data back, compared to Korean firms that now look like they are designing and producing a range of potentially very effective UAS, but which are comparatively much, much less likely to have access to testing data and information flow back from Ukraine.
OK, so now let's talk something a bit bigger and a traditional area of strength for the Korean arms industry, what did we see when it comes to tanks and armoured vehicles? The product to zoom in on here is probably the Hyundai Rotem K2 main battle tank. We've talked in the past about some of the major export successes this tank has had in recent years. Poland eventually building up to a fleet of 1,000 is probably the most salient example there. But going into this, I was very interested to see what sort of future tech and developments might be on display, and how some of the reps from Hyundai Rotem saw their potential pitch to the market going forward.
Because while I found that usually Korean company representatives are too polite to mention potential competitors directly, we are seeing an international tank market where the Leopard 2A8 for example is starting to make sales, and various next generation programs are in development. So let me just flag a few of the things that stood out to me in terms of the systems, concepts and approach that the Korean firms chose to put on display here. The first is that when it comes to the K2, like a lot of Korean equipment, customisation, technology transfer and localisation are all still absolutely central to the offering.
Talking to the representatives, just about every feature of the K2 I care to name, whether it be the remote weapon station, the protection packages, the sensors, just about everything came with an enormous list of options and a promise that if the customer wanted something different they'd probably find a way to make it work. Even as I tested increasingly outlandish ideas for modification, the answer basically always came back, "Well, if that's what the customer wants." To the point where I half expect that if I asked for a version of the K2 with an ice cream maker in the crew compartment and a World War Two rocket rack mounted on the top of the turret, the answer might just be, "Our factory or yours?" We saw a serious indication of this with the Polish order for K2, where about 80% of the final inventory are meant to be a new version, K2PL, partly manufactured in Poland.
And that degree of flexibility when it comes to design, technology transfer and localisation is far from universal in the global defence market. But in terms of the technology items that were actually being shown off, firstly, the display version of the K2 had an active protection system fitted. Specifically this was the Korean Active Protection System, or KAPS. And it's worth noting that while many previous versions of the K2 didn't mount KAPS or an APS, reporting indicates that both the K2PL, the future Polish version, and the K2 PIP, a future Korean version, do intend to include things like an active protection system and drone jammers. The observation I'd make here is that as drones and loitering munitions have proved to be such major threats to main battle tanks and other armoured vehicles, there may be more demand for these kinds of systems adapted to those sort of threats going forward.
Even though things like active protection systems and drone jammers can add cost and weight to the underlying vehicle, Hyundai Rotem seems to be betting that for their customers at least, the extra survivability is going to be worth those trade-offs. Partly related to that issue of countering drones, another observation is that remote controlled weapon stations are absolutely everywhere, at least on the demo vehicles. As far as some of these Korean firms seem to be concerned, manually-operated machine guns are out, and remote control weapon stations (often equipped with thermal optics) are very much in. I bring this up not just because remote stations can help improve crew survivability (armour generally doesn't protect you very well if you have to stick part of your body outside it) but also because there can be a significant capability leap with some of these systems. You might have optics and sensors that are good enough to potentially detect and engage some drones and a variety of different weapon options.
There are RCWSs out there with options for everything from .50 calibre machine guns and 30mm cannon, up to ATGMS and even MANPADS. And what that means is potentially even more options on how you choose to configure everything from your main battle tanks down to small automated support vehicles like the one you see on the right here. But the thing it felt like everyone was looking at in the Hyundai Rotem section was this concept model for the K3. Now I need stress up front this is a concept, not a finished vehicle design. As far as the public reporting goes, you can't roll up to the CEO of Hyundai Rotem and say, "I'd like a thousand of that thing, please."
You probably won't see an actual finished K3 or next generation MBT design until the 2030s. Instead, what it is meant to do is serve as a kind of demonstrator of where the company's thinking on future MBT design is going. And in that respect there's a few things that instantly stand out, like an active protection system, next generation main gun, remote controlled weapon station, integrated loitering munition launcher, a bay at the back for launching and recovering an organic ISR reconnaissance drone asset (which is an interesting addition) and I believe an unmanned turret using an auto-loading system. Now I am probably not the one to weigh in on the potential value or drawbacks of any of those individual features. But it'll be interesting to see how Korean thinking on next generation MBT design evolves in the coming years.
And also what role industrial partners like Poland might potentially play in that development journey. But leaving aside all those technical and diplomatic aspects of the pitch for a moment, there's another element of the K2 at KADEX that stood out. Sometimes even the most disciplined of government and military officials can be swayed by something that just looks really, really cool. And while many exhibitions might be generally pretty happy to just roll out scale models of things and talk to the technical specifications, at KADEX the Koreans brought the better part of two platoon of actual K2s and proceeded to demonstrate the absolute heck out of them.
To give you an idea of what I am talking about, the following footage comes from the rehearsal for the final demonstrations. And yes, this is the part where I get gently and harmlessly fragged by a couple of smoke grenades. The essence of this demonstration as we are going through it, noting it is a demonstration not an exercise, is that we had Korean army engineers open up two lines of advance for the rest of the force. One through the use of a bridge laying tank, the other with a K600 clearing a simulated minefield. And then we saw reconnaissance elements and the main battle tanks advance through those simulated lanes and prepare to carry on the attack. Unfortunately, we didn't have the equivalent of a sports announcer calling the plays as they happened, so you'll have to make do with me for the moment.
And yes, I did get lulled into a bit of a false sense of security here, right before the smoke went off. And then over the course of several stages we had a combined armour and infantry assaults with the K2 tanks pushing forward. And then you'll eventually see the armour closing into very close contact with the unnamed opposing force made up of Koreans flying red flags.
Leading to some tank manoeuvring that I think really shows off both the gun stabilisation system on the K2 and also just how much these things can really get up and go even in quite a constrained space. The demonstration would then continue with the opposing K2 tanks being destroyed, the South Korean infantry advancing, and then the entire armoured assembly (including the supporting K9 artillery pieces) advancing into the formerly occupied enemy positions. Obviously no hyper-realistic exercise would actually involve tanks circling around each other at high speed, firing rounds point blank like a game of World of Tanks. But as a way of demonstrating armour and very basic concepts to a crowd on a very small training field, I have to admit it made for a pretty engaging spectator sport.
But talking about unmanned turrets and future tech developments links into another trend that I think came through very clearly at KADEX. And that is this relentless push in Korean systems development towards more and more automation. The drive here is probably a combination of push and pull factors.
On one hand, this is a country with a developed industrial economy, a lot of engineering talent, and experience with industrial robotics and automation. That naturally pulls the military towards trying to take advantage of that tech base. On the other hand, the ROK is facing one of the most dramatic demographic declines in the world. In 2023 the reported fertility rate in the Republic of Korea was 0.72 children per woman.
In a zero net migration scenario, you'd need a level of 2.1 just to hold the population steady. What that means is that over time, the Korean population is expected to age and shrink dramatically. And given that South Korea's conscription system means that the size of the ROK military is pretty closely correlated with the number of people in those younger age cohorts that conscripts are pulled from, the ROK military is having to transition from one where manpower is freely available and relatively cheap, thanks to conscription, to one where troops are an increasingly rare commodity, and the military needs to get the maximum possible value out of each and every one. That's where we are already seeing robotics and automation play a role that's likely only going to increase as time goes on.
A lot of Korean armoured vehicles for example include features that are designed to cut down crew size. What you are looking at here for example is a self-propelled, semi-automatic loading, 120mm mortar system. A relatively new vehicle I think contracted for mass production back in 2022, which the ROK is adopting to replace the older 4.2 inch mortars that were previously in service. Now reportedly, according to the company, compared to the system this replaced it's got very roughly twice the range, twice the firepower, has greater accuracy because of the addition of a modern fire-control system, can rotate that mortar 360 degrees without rotating the vehicle. And according to the Korean Defence Acquisition Program Administration, the number of troops required to operate a unit of these things has been dropped from 32 to 24. Now for some unknowable reason, these vehicles that were on public display weren't fully stocked with ammunition, so the crew weren't able to fully demonstrate the loading system in action. That said, you probably get the point.
More bang with fewer people was a theme you would see again and again at KADEX. We also saw a number of firms present with fully automated systems. Everything from robo-dogs, armed and unarmed, and then steadily increasing up the weight and cost classes from unmanned utility vehicles all the way through to quite advanced system concepts. At the top end of the spectrum for example, you could see an intention to domestically manufacture air combat drones for use in manned/unmanned teaming.
Here you'll see an illustration of a Korean concept (noting it is still very much in the concept phase) for combining their domestically produced KF-21 with an almost collaborative combat aircraft-style drone, as well as smaller systems. The basic concept that seemed to flow through again and again, whether you were talking about finished and prototype products, or things that were just concepts at this stage, was that wherever ever possible in the future the Korean military wants combat power to be built, not staffed. Next up, let's talk things that quite literally go boom: fires and munitions. As you are probably picking up at this point, artillery and ground-based fires are absolutely central to the ROK way of war. And there was so much focus on fires at this event that I really need to split this section into three categories: munitions, MRLs, and cannon artillery systems. To an extent there might be a little bit of a chicken and egg phenomenon going on when you talk about the munitions and systems that were being shown off in this category at KADEX.
On one hand a lot of what was being demonstrated seemed pretty well aligned with the lessons and observations we have seen from the war in Ukraine so far. But what wasn't always clear was where those systems reflected lessons learned and the influence of the war in Ukraine, and where it was more a case of the war in Ukraine reflecting more what South Korea has long expected a conventional land war with its bordering neighbour to look like. I suspect at this point that it's probably a mixture of the two. With the war in Ukraine drawing heavily on capabilities that are traditional areas of South Korean speciality, at least in the defence industrial space. Regardless of the exact drivers though, there were definitely a couple of trends that stood out. Firstly, at least from the Korean perspective, cluster munitions are absolutely back on the menu.
In the latter part of the 20th and early part of the 21st century the general global trend was away from cluster munitions. A majority of countries around the world have signed a convention banning the things, and even countries that haven't signed, like the United States, have often done things like mothball their supply of cluster ammunition, stopped producing new cluster ammunition, and also looking for potential alternatives. There's a reason the United States for example has that alternative warhead option for HIMARS that uses the pre-formed tungsten fragments rather than sub-munitions. The problem from a purely military perspective though, in terms of decision-making pressure, is that cluster munitions have always been pretty good at their jobs. They come with risks and humanitarian dangers that cannot be easily dismissed, but as battlefield weapons, time and time again they have proven very effective.
In Ukraine Russia has employed cluster munitions on a truly lavish scale, meaning often they don't need pinpoint accuracy in their weapons because the area of effect is so wide. Ukraine also eventually got its hands on at least two types of Cold War relic from the United States. The old discontinued cluster version of ATACMS that we've seen wreck entire helicopter bases and air defence installations in a single salvo.
And the old DPICM 155mm cluster shells. Based on Ukrainian feedback and the visual evidence, it seems that both those systems have proven effective well beyond what their cost and age might suggest. And since the war began we've already seen at least one country, Lithuania, withdraw from the Cluster Munition Convention. For a lot of countries, cluster munitions are still taboo systems. But in Korea, at KADEX, they were everywhere.
There were a lot of munitions with current equivalents, like 155mm shells with various sub-munition payloads, but there are also more recent, almost hybrid, systems. For example, while a lot of attention there was focused on the drones, the tanks, etc. I had to do a bit of a double take when I walked past the system on the right there, because what you are looking at is an MRL projectile for the K239 Chunmoo that has exactly zero chill.
In some ways you can think of this as a Korean system somewhat similar to the Gimlers rockets used by HIMARS and M270. According to the Koreans, like Gimlers it is GNS/INS guided, loaded in pods of six, has about the same range, and while prices are never easy when it comes to making like-for-like comparisons, the numbers I was being quoted were roughly in the same ballpark as Gimlers. When I asked about the Circular Error Probable (which took a little bit of finessing with the translator but we got there eventually) I was quoted a specification CEP of 15 metres and a tested CEP of 5 metres.
And if I presume like all normal people, you read US weapons testing and evaluation reports in your spare time, you might remember that the contract specification for CEP for the American M30 A1 rocket for Gimlers was also 15 metres. Although the median miss distance in their testing was a little bit tighter, from memory, somewhere between I think 2.1 and 2.7 metres in the test that I looked at. Those are the similarities, basically everything to do with the performance of the missile itself. The difference is in the payload. The version we were shown
is intended to pack around 300 scatterable sub-munitions per rocket. That means 1,800 sub-munitions per missile pod, 3,600 per vehicle (assuming the K239 is being used) and more than 14,000 sub-munitions if you get a battery of 4 vehicles to fire all at once. So far as the area of effect of these rockets go, I didn't get explicit permission to talk about exact scatter distances, but suffice to say the chosen unit of measurement for that conversation was soccer fields. In that context an extra metre or two of CEP probably isn't make or break. And if you're in a battlefield environment where GPS has been reduced to little more than a fictional concept, the system might still be effective even if it has to deal with the extra inaccuracy that comes from firing INS only. It's an interesting concept because it clearly has the option of trying to be a precision weapon, or alternatively allowing you to address your warmest regards to a set of grid coordinates and call it a day.
There is a broader point around market pitch and positioning to be made here, but we'll come back to it in just a moment. Because I need to stress it wasn't just the large-scale munitions that stood out here, there were a lot of smaller sub-munitions on offer as well. Including entire families of munitions that tapped into something we've increasingly started to see in Ukraine, the development of munitions that are purpose-built for use by drones rather than being adapted from other existing weapon systems. We saw a number of small EFP modules for example, intended to give drones and loitering munitions the ability to punch through armour even in quite a small package, and I'll show you just one example here. This was one of the many drop drones we saw on display, and you are seeing designs like this one proliferate around the world. But for me the interesting thing here isn't really the drone platform itself, it's the munition and the release mechanism.
This thing used double 9-round magazines for 18 sub-munitions per drone. And despite those things being pretty small and pretty light, the test data provided suggested that against a lot of armoured targets, they are probably good enough. If you offered the Ukrainians the actual rotor platform itself, they might be ambivalent, given the number of their own designs they currently have in service.
But if you offered them millions of tiny munitions explicitly designed for drone use, you'd probably have a contract signed before you could say "turret toss". But let's crank it up here about 15 size categories to have a look at another system class that's attracted a lot of attention since 2022, the multiple rocket launchers. The household name here is probably the wheeled American system, HIMARS, that's made such a difference in Ukraine starting in 2022. But at KADEX the flag for American rocket artillery systems was being flown by the older tracked M270.
This is "Coco" belonging to the American 2nd Infantry Division looking a bit plain the day before the event kicked off. But don't worry, they had her dressed up a bit by the time the crowd started to arrive. But a lot of the focus was obviously being directed towards the Korean system on display, K239 Chunmoo. Like the K2 battle tank and the K9 howitzer we'll discuss in a moment, K239 has seen an increasing degree of export success. This system will also be going to Poland for example in significant numbers, combining the Korean missile system and munitions with a Polish truck chassis.
As one of the reps put it to me, the core of the system is platform agnostic, so the truck is basically a swappable element. If you compare K239 to both HIMARS and M270, it's a bit of a hybrid. It's a wheeled system like HIMARS, but it packs 2 missile pods like the M270, unlike the 1 of HIMARS. One of the trends we've noticed with K239 however, and how Hanwha Aerospace is attempting to market the system, is that the range of munitions either available for, or in development for the system is rapidly expanding. And that's made relatively easy by that universal pod system.
You might be able to pack six medium-sized rockets into an area that could also be filled by a larger number of smaller unguided systems, or a single tactical ballistic missile. There are elements of South Korean missile and rocket technology that show a little bit of Russian DNA, partly as a result of technology transfers after the end of the Cold War. But when it comes to the system of reloading and logistics, it's very American. One of the things that might attract customers to K239 is munition and thus role diversity. You have guided missiles broadly analogous to the American Gimlers. But you also potentially have options at either extreme of the cost and range spectrum.
Packs of 20 smaller unguided rockets per pod might provide a massed affordable fires capability against area targets. Which arguably as the war in Ukraine is showing, is still potentially a valuable capability. And then we have potential and planned offerings at the other extreme of the spectrum.
Giving the system the ability to fire two longer-range tactical ballistic missiles (one per pod), will likely give K239 customers a capability that's broadly similar to that of the American ATACMS. Given the general global demand for those systems, and the performance we've seen by TBMs like ATACMS and Iskander in Ukraine, there might be buyers out there looking more seriously at the K239 as these kind of longer-ranged options start to arrive. We also saw the unveiling earlier this year of a concept for an anti-ship ballistic missile, again intended for compatibility with Chunmoo. At the time, Hanwha indicated that a system like this might be useful for potential buyers like the Philippines. Ones that might want to have an anti-ship missile capability for coastal defence, while also using a system that can fill a lot of other roles if you just swap out the missile pods.
The crux of the pitch, so to speak here, seems to be an attempt to differentiate in the MRL market by combining those traditional Korean defence industrial strengths of technology transfer, localisation, competitive pricing, etc. with an increasingly diverse and quite modern munition offering. And when the system in question is basically at its core a truck designed to schlep missiles around, having good missiles is probably pretty core to the value of the system.
Which brings us to the final category of vehicles I wanted to talk about under this fires heading, which is the self-propelled guns. It's perhaps unsurprising that an artillery-centric army like the ROKA would produce a pretty good piece of self-propelled artillery. At the risk of giving a slightly biased take, given there may or may not be a country in the southern hemisphere building a particularly well-named version of the thing, as far as the international market is concerned Korea has long been onto a bit of a winner with the K9 155mm self-propelled gun.
In a sense the K9 is kind of like the Borg of military equipment. It's sold to a range of operators from Norway to Türkiye to India and Poland, and often whenever it's been sold, buyers have added their own tweaks, upgrade requests or additional features. Some of which have then been absorbed into the technological distinctiveness of the system as a whole and ended up marketed to other potential customers. The version of the vehicle pitched to Australia for example, integrated the Norwegian Odin fire support system, which had originally made its way into the Norwegian version. And an interesting aspect here is the way Hanwha Aerospace and the Koreans have broadly attempted to try and lean into that effect. I spoke to them about something commonly called the "K9 user club", which brings together the representatives of various countries that operate K9 platforms so they can discuss lessons learned, share experience, and also potential further developments and industrial cooperation.
The idea certainly isn't unique to Hanwha Aerospace or the K9, we've seen it used for a variety of military systems in the past, but part of the idea is that you can potentially generate what are called "network effects". Where the value of something increases the more people participate in it, causing more people to want to participate in it. The more K9s there are and the more users choose to participate in these kind of forums, the more lessons there are to learn, the more valuable the forum is, the more likely others are to attend and buy the system. Thus causing yet more lessons to be learned, developments to be made, the value of the forum to increase, and hopefully more countries to buy the system. An interesting note here is that this year, alongside many of the regular attendees like Finland, Estonia, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Australia, for the first time we also saw the United States participate as an observer.
Given that the US Army reportedly scrapped its Extended Range Cannon Artillery effort earlier this year, forcing the service to once again fall back on the good old M109, it's interesting to see the Americans participating in discussions related to a Korean artillery system. One that notably, like the German PzH 2000, mounts a longer 52 calibre gun compared to the 39 calibre system on the American M109. A potential size issue that, as we've seen in Ukraine, drives a potentially very significant range issue. When it comes to the future development of K9 however, and the effort to win more market share my discussions with Hanwha Aerospace really focused on two distinct lines of effort. The first, potentially partly informed by experiences in Ukraine, is to find ways to squeeze even more range out of the system.
That includes things potentially like extended range or extreme range 155mm ammunition options. So if necessary crews can engage targets, albeit at some cost, well beyond the range of ordinary shells. As an aside, when I talked to Poongsan, the major shell manufacturer, they had a number of extended range 155mm shells on display. And generally seemed fairly optimistic about demand in that market segment. Given the costs and limitations involved, you probably don't want your 155mm guns to be firing extreme range ammunition all the time. But for certain specialised tasks users may see the value there.
The other line of development we discussed there had to do with an incredibly high-tech solution to the challenge of trying to get more range out of a 155mm gun: you make the gun longer. Hanwha Aerospace has reportedly previously done some thinking around taking a K9A2 and mounting a 58 calibre gun on it. That's notably the same length of cannon that the Americans were looking at for the ERCA. Speaking to a Hanwha Aerospace rep, they seem to be pretty confident that a 58 calibre version is something they could do.
The challenge as you noted however, is that you now have a very, very long very heavy gun pointed out of the front of your vehicle. If you are in flat, open terrain like a lot of Ukraine, that might be a straight positive, giving you desperately needed range. But if you are in Finland for example, trying to gun the thing down a forest track it may not be ideal driving a vehicle that looks kind of like Pinocchio after someone asked him some awkward, pointed questions.
That said, in the concepts we saw for the future version of the K9, the K9A3, the 58 calibre gun did make an appearance. Hanwha was also very keen to put forward ideas for the upcoming K9A3. While the A3 is still in development and will likely involve technical cooperation with various K9 users, the central name of the game here appears to be automation, automation, automation. The concept we were shown was that instead of putting crews in each individual K9 system, what you would instead do is build a control vehicle. Take a K9 chassis, replace the turret with a fixed superstructure, remove the main gun, and instead put a crew in there with all kinds of fancy communication and control systems. What you would then do is have that control vehicle directing and controlling three unmanned K9A3s.
That approach presumably wouldn't be without its complications and drawbacks, but it would significantly reduce the number of personnel required to operate the battery. And it would also presumably mean designers have a little more internal volume to play with when they are designing the unmanned gun-armed system. Suffice to say, it'll be interesting to see how this concept evolves and whether there might be buyers outside Korea potentially interested in space-age automated super guns. Moving on from the K9, there's another aspect of the artillery systems we looked at that I thought deserved a quick mention. In the artillery war in Ukraine range has often been at a premium, but mobility and volume of fire have also often been highly valued. On the Ukrainian side in particular, I think it's worth noting that the vast majority of systems we've seen pledged and delivered in 2023 and 2024 in that cannon artillery category, and also produced by Ukrainian industry in that category, have been self-propelled not towed.
It's been M109, Bohdana, CAESAR, PzH 2000, Zuzana, Krab, the list goes on. That represents a significant shift in priority from the earlier stages of the war where we were seeing a lot of towed M777s being sent for example. And part of the reason that might be the case comes through in the visually confirmed loss data.
As best as we can tell from that open source, the M777s have had a very difficult war to date. While a lot of the more mobile systems have suffered considerably less, even accounting for the fact that they arrived later. We've seen some soul-searching in certain Western militaries about where exactly towed artillery might fit in future force structures. But it stood out to me that at KADEX one of the most significant artillery powers in the world, the Republic of Korea, was overwhelmingly showing off self-propelled systems. And beyond the K9 there were some other vehicles that stood out in terms of this attempt to combine mobility and volume of fire in an artillery vehicle.
The vehicle you can see on the right there for example is called the K105A1. At first glance this looks very much like a very basic field expedient measure. That is an old 105mm howitzer on what looks like a relatively basic truck chassis. The drivers of why a vehicle like this might exist in the Korean military should be fairly obvious. This is a force which values having as much firepower available as possible.
It has thousands of these older 105 mm guns, and also, critically, a lot of rounds to fire from them. One senior figure I was talking to about this vehicle suggested half the reason these things are in service in the numbers they are, is they have a very, very large number of shells in inventory still. And while I can't give that exact number on YouTube, suffice to say that even Ukraine would probably take multiple years to go through the stockpile. So far this is probably a very familiar argument as to why you might keep older equipment around, and in the past we've used it to describe why Russia maintains even some World War Two-era designs in reserve, or sometimes in the field. The twist however, is that unlike Russia and North Korea with their 70 year old howitzers, with most of these systems South Korean industry has been able to cram in an incredible amount of technological upgrades and add-ons to increase the value that each gun and each round of ammunition brings.
For example, the guys standing near the gun there are mostly there to load it. The gun is actually aimed and controlled by a relatively swish fire control system that is arguably superior to some you might see on the oldest versions of the K9 or some versions of the M109. Yes, guns like this will always be limited by the older age of the system and the calibre of ammunition.
But Korean industry has been very aggressive in applying technology to increase the mobility and accuracy of this system, so they have another way to deliver volume of fire on the battlefield by leveraging these older systems without large crew counts. I'm not saying the design is perfect, it's an older truck design, an older gun design, and a smaller calibre of ammunition. But I think it does illustrate an approach to problem solving and a way of trying to squeeze as much as possible out of older systems. And taking that pursuit of light, very mobile artillery firepower even further, inside the exhibition hall itself you could find examples like this one. A legacy artillery piece mounted on a more modern lighter vehicle. Basically the South Korean military's tendency at this point seems to be to look at any vehicle and ask, "Why isn't there an artillery piece on it yet?" And to look at any artillery piece and ask, "Why isn't it on a vehicle yet?" Another thing I got an impression of quite quickly, is that there are a lot of people in the Korean military watching the tactics used in Ukraine quite closely.
And that even some relatively junior personnel we talk to had a level of awareness of some of the things we have seen there, and the potential adaptations and lessons learned flowing from that. At least as they related to their particular speciality. I'll give you just one example, which makes a certain degree of sense considering the Korean context. To a great extent Ukraine has given us a case study in 21st century trench warfare, so to speak.
And specifically the way that old battlefield challenges like landmines and fortifications can combine with things like drones and accurate indirect fire to create a major barrier for potential offensive actions. Mines have been a massive barrier again and again in Ukraine, and were a major issue when the Ukrainians attempted to go on the offensive in the middle of 2023. Over the course of the war we have seen Russia take steps to make those traditional threats even more dangerous. And we have talked [before] about some of the ways they have done that, from stacked mines to scatterable mines to extending the depths of existing minefields. ... But leaving aside those Russian tactics for a moment, the Korean military has long been pretty familiar with that basic underlying threat: minefields plus fortifications. The Korean Peninsula is still one of the most heavily mined places on earth.
And so perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a lot of specialised equipment and personnel focused on dealing with that sort of threat. One good example of that that we got to see was the K600 engineering vehicle you can see on the right there. This is based on the old K1 MBT chassis, and it has your classic suite of high-end engineering and mine-clearing vehicle equipment.
Those prongs at the front for example, are part of a system for countering magnetic mines. Then you have the primary plough, the excavator arm, and a few other potentially nice to have features. For example when we were there on the set-up day, one of the senior Korean personnel with us asked the crew to quickly demonstrate one of those features, which I'll show you quickly now. What you're seeing here is the vehicle deploy a remote-control marking system. Those two canisters will actually fire marking flags down into the ground in order to mark out the path that the vehicle has cleared of mines and other threats.
That might make it potentially easier for following vehicles and infantry under potentially very confused battlefield conditions, to follow through along a path that has a significantly lower explosive content than the surrounding area. You'll often see somewhat similar systems on other equivalent vehicles, like the American M1150 based on the Abrams. But what was most interesting for me wasn't necessarily the vehicle itself, although it's obviously an interesting piece of equipment, but rather talking to the crew. Through the translator I struck up a quick conversation with one of the blokes operating these things, and I started talking about various Russian tactics that we've seen used to frustrate mine clearing and breaching attempts.
And I don't know whether it was because he was just happy to talk shop for a bit, but he was very forthcoming with his thoughts and a couple of things became clear as the conversation went on. Firstly, he seemed to be pretty well across the tactics and techniques I brought up, including the ones we really only started to see appear in open source in 2023. We talked about some relatively basic stuff like double stacking anti-tank mines in order to destroy clearing equipment, or using command-detonated explosives and scatterable mines. As well as some meaner and more niche examples that I really only have anecdotal evidence for at this point.
And in each case he seemed familiar with or at least unfazed by the potential tactics, and set out how their system (or various supporting systems) could deal with that kind of potential threat. The answer was never, "Well, I guess we'll just bog down and die then," or "Let me think about that for a moment." It always felt like, reading into his responses, that the assumption was always, "If Russia could do it, North Korea might too, but it's not going to stop my vehicle getting where it needs to go." The slightly bitter-sweet footnote to all that is that Ukraine has been supplied with the K600 system by South Korea, but only 2 units and only for humanitarian purposes. Ukraine can use the K600 for most of what it was originally designed to do: clear minefields full of Soviet-style mines. But unless something changes, we presumably won't be seeing them used in the armoured breaching role.
Another lesson that appears to potentially be flowing out from Ukraine into the rest of the sector is the potential role of electronic warfare on future battlefields. Particularly when you are talking about the usef
2024-10-17 00:22
