North Korea Is Building Its Own Lethal ‘Swarms on the Water’

By Michael Peck,The National Interest

If South Korea goes to war with its northern neighbor, one of the threats that it will face is swarms of small naval craft [4] armed with missiles and torpedoes.

And how is South Korea is preparing to defeat them? With swarms of rockets fired from multiple rocket launchers mounted on small patrol vessels.

North Korea currently has about 300 fast attack craft, ranging from twenty-ton torpedo boats to a half-dozen Nongo-class surface effect ships—a sort of hovercraft—that weigh in at 200 tons, and carry a 76mm cannon and a North Korean version of Russia’s Kh-35 antiship missile [5]. The backbone of the North Korean force [6] is composed of more than 200 torpedo boats, armed with a couple of torpedo tubes and some machine guns or small cannon.

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This mosquito fleet could hardly inflict more than a mosquito bite in an open sea battle against the South Korean and U.S. navies. But used in coastal waters, they could potentially prove devastating by conducting quick, surprise attacks with flotillas of boats to overwhelm the defenses of enemy ships. That such attacks would be suicidal wouldn’t trouble Pyongyang if the prize was sinking or damaging a South Korean destroyer, a U.S. cruiser or even an American carrier.

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South Korea’s response was recently unveiled at the recent MADEX 2017 trade show, where Korean companies LIG Nex1 and Hanwha unveiled a rocket launcher system, specifically designed to stop North Korean swarm attacks. It will equip the South Korean navy’s Patrol Killer Experimental, or PKX-B, patrol boats.