North Korea's Weird New Navy - New Destroyers & A North Korean Blue Water Navy?

Episode Overview

• The Rise of a New Naval Player: This episode analyzes North Korea's unexpected and rapid transition from a coastal "mosquito fleet" to building 5,000-ton guided-missile destroyers, shifting the traditional naval power balance in the Asia-Pacific region.
• The Russian Connection: It details how North Korea's support of Russia's war in Ukraine has yielded a $13 billion economic and technical windfall, bypassing decades of international sanctions and accelerating its naval modernization.
• Design vs. Doctrine: The discussion explores the bizarre design of these new vessels, which pack an unprecedented amount of offensive firepower onto small hulls while employing archaic, pre-dreadnought era survivability and engineering standards.
• Strategic Misallocation: It evaluates whether building a high-visibility surface fleet is a viable strategic move or a costly propaganda exercise, given the air and undersea supremacy of its adversaries.

Key Concepts

• The Transition to Blue Water Ambitions: Prior to the 2020s, the Korean People's Army Navy (KPAN) relied on outdated Soviet-era Romeo-class submarines and small coastal patrol craft. The commissioning of the Choe Hyon (Hull 51) and Hull 52—both 5,000-ton destroyers—signals an aggressive push toward a blue-water surface presence and sea-based nuclear deterrence.
• Geopolitical Defense Windfalls: The war in Ukraine created a critical economic and technical pipeline for Pyongyang. In exchange for millions of artillery shells and ballistic missiles, Moscow has supplied North Korea with hard currency, fuel, and advanced military technology, directly upgrading their naval capabilities.
• "Dakka-Over-Safety" Design Philosophy: North Korea's new destroyers prioritize raw firepower over crew survivability and damage control. The ships pack 88 Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells onto a 5,000-ton hull—a weapon-to-displacement ratio nearly double that of Western counterparts—sacrificing structural endurance and safety for offensive output.
• Archaic Naval Architecture (Anachronistic Firing Ports): The Choe Hyon features closeable firing ports in the superstructure for crew members to manually aim and fire heavy machine guns from inside corridors. This pre-dreadnought era design is unheard of in modern naval warfare due to noise, smoke, and extreme crew safety hazards.
• Civilian vs. Military Shipbuilding Standards: Unlike standard warships that feature exposed wiring, conduits, and piping for rapid damage detection and repair, the Choe Hyon features polished, wood-grain paneling and finished ceilings. This suggests reliance on civilian commercial shipyard standards, which severely compromises combat damage control.
• Surface Fleet Vulnerability: Large surface combatants are highly visible to modern satellite constellations and radar. For a state facing the combined air and submarine superiority of the US, South Korea, and Japan, these 5,000-ton ships are incredibly fragile and lack the survivability offered by land-based mobile launchers or submarines.

Quotes

• At 1:05 - "When your nation has a nominal GDP closer to Burkina Faso than Beijing, aspiring to roughly match the United States on destroyer tonnage produced per year is a totally sensible and reasonable defense industrial goal." - Explains the extreme economic disproportion of North Korea's massive naval expansion relative to its actual economic output.
• At 2:22 - "North Korea has reaped $13 billion from military aid to Russia, South Korean intelligence says... cashing in on hard currency, resources, and technical assistance from Moscow." - Outlines the primary economic and technical catalyst enabling North Korea's sudden naval modernization.
• At 5:00 - "Kim Jong Un recently described his navy as having gone through 'over 70 years of stagnation' and declared that in terms of military hardware, the navy was the weakest of all the services." - Highlights the official admission by North Korean leadership regarding the historically poor state of their naval forces prior to this recent push.
• At 7:37 - "The standard submarines... were 20 copies of the old Soviet Romeo class—a design the Soviets stopped manufacturing in 1961." - Illustrates the extreme obsolescence of North Korea’s legacy underwater fleet, emphasizing why their transition to newer designs is such a stark leap.
• At 15:09 - "North Korea should build two warships a year in the next five years, Kim says... including a new 10,000-ton design." - Demonstrates the highly ambitious production rate target set by North Korean leadership, which rivals the peacetime output of much larger nations.
• At 17:35 - "This is a missile boat first, with lots and lots of VLS... 88 cells on a ship of 5,000 tons displacement. For comparison, a US Arleigh Burke-class mounts 96 cells on a ship about twice that displacement." - Explains the design philosophy of North Korea's new destroyers, which prioritizes packing maximum offensive firepower onto a relatively small hull.
• At 23:54 - "Those are indeed firing ports of some kind... where a designer has presumably made a conscious decision to leave a closeable hole in the side of the ship so they can poke an additional gun out. There are many, many reasons that ships around the world haven't generally done this since the pre-dreadnought era." - Explaining the bizarre integration of archaic manual gun ports in modern hull design.
• At 29:00 - "Warships look the way they do not because people specifically appreciate the industrial chic, but because from a point of view of how you build, how you manage volume, how you integrate systems, and how you maximize survivability, this is the approach that tends to make more sense." - Clarifying why exposed cables and pipes are a tactical necessity, rather than an aesthetic choice.
• At 38:34 - "The whole thing has vaguely 'Plan Z' vibes about it: extremely ambitious and capable of turning out a couple of ships that might play well for the cameras, but militarily a doomed effort and a massive misallocation of resources." - Delivering the core critique of North Korea's surface navy expansion program.

Takeaways

• Differentiate between military capabilities and domestic propaganda: Do not assume pristine, finished interiors equate to combat readiness; hiding vital systems behind commercial paneling severely degrades damage control capabilities under fire.
• Prioritize survivability over raw firepower in modern defense planning: Over-allocating vertical launch cells at the expense of defensive systems, structural integrity, and propulsion space creates glass cannons that cannot survive sustained engagements.
• Account for transactional defense relationships in regional threat assessments: Monitor how secondary conflicts (like the war in Ukraine) allow isolated states to acquire modern military technologies and bypass long-standing sanctions.
• Expect trial-and-error procurement patterns from emerging defense producers: Rapid, public changes to weapons and sensor suites on a single hull indicate that initial launches likely feature non-functioning mockups or highly unstable designs.
• Evaluate naval investments through the lens of overall strategic survivability: Recognizing that building large, high-visibility surface combatants without air cover or anti-submarine support is a misallocation of resources compared to asymmetric land or undersea assets.