North Korea has sent rocket launchers disguised as civilian trucks to Russia to support the combined Russian-North Korean force battling an incursion by Ukrainian troops.
As part of a military parade in Pyongyang in 2023, the North Korean army showed off a variety of civilian box trucks and dump trucks with multiple-launch rocket tubes secreted inside them. This week or earlier, the box truck launcher showed up in Kursk Oblast in western Russia, where 60,000 Russian and North Korean troops are trying to eject 20,000 Ukrainians from a 250-square-mile salient the Ukrainians captured in an August invasion.
The incognito launcher with 12 ready-to-fire 122-millimeter rockets, each ranging 19 miles, is the fifth major vehicle type North Korea has deployed to Russia alongside the North Korean 11th Army Corps, which had 12,000 troops when it arrived in October but has since lost a third of them in infantry-first assaults on Ukrainian positions.
The hundreds of North Korean vehicles include Bulsae-4 anti-tank missile launchers, M1989 170-millimeter howitzers, M1991 240-millimeter rocket launchers as well as at least one rare Tor air-defense system on a wheeled chassis. Russian troops accidentally blew up the Tor earlier this month after mistaking it for a Ukrainian system.
The box truck launcher is a strange system of potentially limited utility. Hiding launchers in civilian trucks might help those trucks move into position ahead of a sneak attack on an unprepared foe. It doesn’t help them avoid Ukrainian artillery and drones on a battlefield where Russian regiments are already using many thousands of civilian vehicles for military purposes.
The Ukrainians have rarely hesitated to blow up civilian-style vehicles they locate near the front line. They’ll surely hesitate even less now that they know the North Koreans are stashing rockets in box trucks.
The box truck launchers might not make much of a difference in the battle for Kursk. Inasmuch as the launcher is based on North Korea’s undisguised BM-21 launcher, “the system has lower precision than typical artillery and cannot be used in situations that call for pinpoint accuracy,” the U.S. Army explained. “It relies on a large number of shells dissipating over an area for a certain hit rate on specific targets.”
Can North Korean commanders mass enough of the disguised launchers for an effective barrage? There are reasons to be skeptical. Russia has lost more than 250 BM-21s to enemy action in the first 35 months of its wider war on Ukraine; North Korea might need to send a lot of box truck launchers to ensure enough of them get past Ukrainian artillery and drones to set up for a bombardment.
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