South Korea is going to be (justifiably) Big Mad about that
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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I'm sure SK can produce 100x more than NK can without breaking a sweat.
It’s not about how much SK can produce.
It’s about the fact that SK is now going to have to create a whole new IADS layer to defend against these cheap tactical kamikaze drones / prop-driven cruise missiles.
Just connect the gaming cafes up to FPV drones. Whenever a Shahed is heading their way, divert some of the players to gun them down and win a stuffed bear or something.
At least with guns, they’re more evenly matched. South Korea only has some mandatory military service.
But with drones? South Korea has entire generations of gamers training their whole lives for this.
…you should look into what this shit is doing to Ukraine. They’re quite difficult and tedious to intercept, and they are cheap enough that it’s not that hard to launch saturation attacks.
Put another way: if NK just converts a bunch of factories and cranks out, like, a quarter million of them over a few years (they’re very simple - I don’t think that’s an insane proposition, seriously), that becomes an existential conventional strike capability, especially if you factor in their artillery assets too. They could ruin every single military and industrial zone in SK in a single strike if they built up a stockpile like that. Seriously, hundreds to thousands of small weaponized UAVs per target where the target list is in the hundreds is not something that modern day IADS could hack - much less economically. The only systems that are going to be able to effectively deal with massed and sustained attacks like that are directed energy weapons, which are only now being rolled out operationally in relatively small numbers, and I’m not sure SK has a system like that ready for deployment.
That’s because Ukraine is stretched thin economically and militarily. Their economy is 10x smaller than Russia and has limited domestic production capabilities.
SK on the other hand, has significant existing defensive and has an economy over 50x NKs. Their 2% GDP military spending is bigger than NKs entire economy!
The only way the Shaheds can be a threat is if SK commanders fail to recognize them as a problem. I won’t discount naivety or incompetence but I’ll bet every military is paying close attention to what’s happening in Ukraine right now.
SK has a number of domestic drone manufacturers and has a growing defense sector, they are most certainly looking at ways to counter whatever NK has access to.
If the NK soldiers sent to Ukraine thought those drones were scary, think what would happen with an entire country of FPV pilots and the production capacity to match could do.
You are grossly underestimating the difficulty of dealing with a saturation attack, much less a sustained one. That sort of attack would ~~likely~~ almost certainly overwhelm the defensive resources of Guam with a couple CVBGs parked offshore.
How so? The only reason they’re so deadly in Ukraine is because they don’t have the resources to adequately defend the huge front and they can’t invest sufficiently to produce a scalable defense.
By the time NK is able to field enough drones for anything close to saturation, SK would have stockpiled more than enough defensive options.
Only 150 or so Gepards have been sent to Ukraine. SK can build their own mobile AAA and can likely have thousands by the time NK has hundreds of drones.
How many Standard + SEARAM + ESSM + CIWS rounds do you think a single base and two surface flotillas could expend in a sustained saturation attack like that? Not how many in the magazines - how many can be effectively expended over a given span of time. Also, take into the account that a part of this strategy typically includes salting the mix with much more modern and capable and fast ASMs/AGMs.
Saturation attacks are the strategy the Soviet (and now Russian) Navy centers their doctrine upon for a reason. And that reason is the USN CVBG. Cheap, numerous drones make that strategy a lot more effective.
Why would you use a missile against a Shahed? Only if you weren’t prepared for that threat and haven’t updated your tactics. The future will be automated drones and use the guns for close range.
As for CIWS, I bet a software update can let it be much more efficient with ammo against slow moving targets. Let’s say 10 per drone, which would mean a Phalanx would be able to take down about 150 per magazine.
You basically need to have an extra layer of air defense to the existing model. Missiles for fast moving threats, drones and guns for the slower threats.
And how many weapons do you think NK can even produce? They have to import all their electronics and hardly have the expertise to improve the technology significantly.
Lmao dude what the fuck would you propose be used against a quarter million kamikaze UAVs?
And more importantly: the defenders need to get lucky every single time. The attackers only need to get lucky once.
Where do you get 250k UAVs from? If Russia is targeting 5000 a month, what makes you think NK can even manage 500 a month? Which would take 40 years to amass 250k.
And hope to counter 250k UAVs? How about 10m UAVs? That’s how much more economic strength SK has in comparison. And that’s not even considering using a cheaper design as a counter.
That would explain why NK has been willing to give him cannon-fodder.