---
title: "North Korea Discovers That Drones Make Expensive Missiles Fly Further"
description: "Pyongyang’s latest drill leaned on the swarm tactic, and the real target may be the other side’s interceptor supply"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-09-28T01:21:23.058Z
modified: 2026-09-28T05:17:46Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/north-korea-discovers-that-drones-make-expensive-missiles-fl-41d591
language: en
tags: ["north-korea", "drones", "missiles", "defense", "warfare", "asia"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# North Korea Discovers That Drones Make Expensive Missiles Fly Further

*Pyongyang’s latest drill leaned on the swarm tactic, and the real target may be the other side’s interceptor supply*

By Nate Ledger · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/north-korea-discovers-that-drones-make-expensive-missiles-fl-41d591

## In brief

- KCNA said on Sept. 14 that North Korean units held a joint strike drill using attack drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, and large rocket launchers
- The swarm tactic aims to force defenders to spend costly interceptors on cheap drones before missiles hit the real targets
- 38 North says Pyongyang has likely used combat data from KN-23 missiles fired by Russia in Ukraine to improve its arsenal
- Satellite imagery shows three new buildings near Kusong airfield, possibly tied to weapons and aircraft production
- CSIS estimated in July that US stocks stood below 1,000 Patriot interceptors and at about 250 THAAD interceptors

Here is a stylised way to think about air defence. You have a very sophisticated, very expensive umbrella. Each umbrella costs millions of dollars. The other side has figured out that instead of throwing one expensive rock through your umbrella, it can throw a few hundred cheap rocks at the same time, wait for you to spend your umbrellas blocking the cheap rocks, and then throw the expensive rock. The expensive rock is the one that matters. The cheap rocks were never the point.

This, roughly, is the logic of what North Korea showed off this month. The Korean Central News Agency said on Sept. 14 that long-range artillery and missile units had carried out a joint strike drill two days earlier, involving attack drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and large-calibre multiple rocket launchers. Pyongyang said the purpose was to practise integrating several weapons into a single operation and to improve its ability to concentrate strikes. The Wall Street Journal reported that North Korea appears to be adopting the ‘swarm tactic’ seen in Ukraine and the Middle East. Rami Kim of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told the Journal that if North Korea’s growing drone capability is combined with its nuclear and missile forces, it could shift the military balance on the Korean Peninsula.

The point of a swarm is not that any one drone is scary. It is that the defender has to make decisions, quickly and repeatedly, about what deserves an interceptor. Drone coming from the north, cruise missile from the coast, ballistic missile lofted overhead: shoot everything and you run out of things to shoot with; shoot selectively and something gets through. The swarm is, at heart, an accounting attack. It makes the defender do arithmetic under time pressure, and the arithmetic is unforgiving.

And North Korea has been getting feedback on its products, so to speak, from a live conflict. Its KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles have been used by Russian forces in Ukraine. The North Korea-focused outlet 38 North assessed in an analysis last month that Pyongyang has likely drawn on the results of those combat launches, and on experience operating mobile launchers, to improve its missile forces — though, as 38 North noted, open-source material doesn’t show which parts of the missile were modified or how. Imagine shipping a product into production with no test environment, and then someone else’s war gives you one. That is, admittedly, a dark version of the tech industry’s favourite business model.

There are also signs of an effort to build more of the cheap rocks. In March, 38 North said satellite imagery showed three new buildings had been completed over the winter at a facility near Kusong airfield, structures believed to be connected to weapons and aircraft production. The Kusong area is associated with North Korea’s testing of new military drones, but whether drones are actually built in those buildings, and at what scale, is unconfirmed.

Sure.

Now, the other side of the spreadsheet. Two CSIS analysts, Benjamin Jensen and Tobias Oestreich, argued in an Aug. 31 note that the military balance in modern war comes down to two production rates: how fast the attacker can build the missiles needed for massed salvos, and how fast the defender can replenish the air-defence weapons it spends. They expect a conflict in which North Korea or China intervenes to strain US and allied stockpiles even more than the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have.

About those stockpiles. CSIS estimated in July, after the Iran war, that the United States had fewer than 1,000 Patriot interceptors and about 250 THAAD interceptors left. Those are estimates of the total US inventory — the whole global umbrella budget, not a Korea-specific one. But the number does a certain amount of work. If a defender has, say, four-figure interceptor stocks and the attacker’s strategy is to make the defender spend those interceptors on cheap drones, then the war becomes a race between the attacker’s drone factory and the defender’s interceptor factory, and not really a contest of missiles at all. The missiles are almost a rounding error in that framing; the logistics are the war.

To be fair to the mystery here: nobody has established that North Korea can actually produce enough weapons, of enough different types, to sustain massed launches over a long period, or operate them effectively in real combat. The drill is read as a signal that it wants to move in that direction, not proof that it has arrived. But the direction itself matters for planning. If the threat model on the peninsula shifts from ‘one big missile, can we intercept it’ to ‘many cheap things, how fast can we reload,’ then interceptor production speed becomes a central variable in the defence of South Korea.

Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Journal that these massed simultaneous attacks ‘significantly change the calculus of air defence.’ Which is a polite way of saying the old calculus assumed the attacker cared about the cost of what it was throwing. The new one assumes it has done the cost comparison, and likes it.