New Cruise Missile Gives North Korea Lethal Capability

Underscoring this threat to the United States and its allies, North Korean media called the cruise missile “a strategic weapon”—wording that implies it could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead. That is no idle claim given the fact that the U.S. intelligence community assesses that North Korea possesses dozens of nuclear warheads.

Unlike the ballistic missiles that were reportedly launched from a train on Wednesday, cruise missiles fly low and hug the terrain they traverse, making them more difficult than other missiles for radar to detect. While North Korea’s cruise missiles fly at slower speeds than ballistic missiles, land-attack cruise missiles can fly on an unpredictable flight path, exacerbating detection efforts. Indeed, the North Korean cruise missile reportedly flew in a figure-eight pattern.

Moreover, land-attack missiles need less ground support to launch and can hit their targets from any direction. That creates headaches for some existing missile defense radar systems that do not provide 360-degree radar coverage.

The new land-attack cruise missiles, therefore, provide Pyongyang with a valuable and lethal new capability, diversifying its arsenal of multiple short-range, medium-range, intermediate-range, and even intercontinental ballistic missiles. All these can be used by the Kim regime to threaten and coerce its adversaries.

Existing Security Council resolutions focus on ballistic missiles as the delivery vehicle for a North Korean nuclear weapon. As early as 2006, the Security Council decided that Pyongyang “shall suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme” and should “abandon all other existing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programme in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner.” Not only has that not happened, but North Korea is also now exploiting the lack of an explicit reference to cruise missiles in these resolutions to increase its long-range strike capabilities.

Kim is also employing an old script in periodically conducting provocative missile launches in an effort to grab international attention, extort sanctions relief, and gain economic concessions in return for no genuine progress toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The United States, as well as its allies and partners, should not fall prey to Kim’s latest gambit.

Conjecture regarding Kim’s motives, however, should not obscure the fact this cruise missile capability significantly increases the threat to U.S. and allied interests in the region.

Accordingly, the Biden administration should adopt new sanctions focused on North Korea’s cruise missiles, while leading a multilateral effort for the Security Council to do the same. Although that step likely won’t deter Pyongyang’s continued development of cruise missiles, it will at least raise the costs for Kim.

More importantly, Pyongyang’s apparent progress in fielding a long-range nuclear-capable cruise missile should serve as another wake-up call for the U.S. Defense Department. Forward-positioned U.S. bases, including those in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, remain unacceptably vulnerable to cruise missile threats.

A 2020 report by the U.S. National Air and Space Intelligence Center assessed that “[t]he cruise missile threat to US forces is increasing in terms of the number of countries possessing LACMs [land-attack cruise missiles], the total number of LACMs, and the number of LACMs possessing advanced capabilities.”

North Korea’s burgeoning interest in cruise missiles is consistent with efforts by its partner Iran to field increasingly capable cruise missiles. In fact, when Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, it did so with land-attack cruise missiles and drones. A 2019 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report on Iran’s military capabilities noted that cruise missiles “present a unique threat profile” compared to ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon should not be surprised if great-power adversaries or rogue states employ cruise missiles against forward-deployed U.S. forces in the future. That’s why the Defense Department must expedite and prioritize efforts to field a next-generation indirect fires protection capability. The new air and missile defense system the U.S. Army is developing with industry will fill a dangerous gap in U.S. capabilities, focusing at least initially on countering unmanned aircraft and cruise missiles.

In the meantime, the U.S. Army can and should deploy, as soon as possible, both of the interim Iron Dome batteries it acquired from Israel to begin to better address cruise missile threats to U.S. forces.

These and other steps can help persuade North Korea and other adversaries that they cannot successfully accomplish their political objectives through military force against the Unites States and its allies.