Kim Jong Un demands “absolute superiority” in drones, with a stealth flying-wing mock-up and a live-fire show of the 600 mm “Sniper”

Kim Jong Un called on North Korean scientists to secure “absolute superiority” in unmanned aircraft for the country, visiting on Thursday, October 29 the “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Technology Development 2026” exhibition. The centrepiece was a mock-up of a large low-observable drone shaped like a flying wing, and after the tour the North Korean leader watched a live-fire demonstration with suicide drones, cruise missiles and the 600 mm multiple rocket launcher. The details were given by the KCNA agency and the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Friday, October 30.

The demonstration coincided with a salvo of about ten short-range ballistic missiles from Wonsan, which South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff recorded the same day. The South Korean agency Yonhap writes that the missiles flew about 250 kilometres. According to the North Korean account, a battalion of the 600 mm launcher, which Pyongyang calls the “Sniper” and which fired publicly for the first time, took part in the live-fire show, while the suicide drones, the air-to-ground missiles from multirole drones and the cruise missiles hit a target on an islet “with 100% accuracy”. The claim comes only from Pyongyang.

What was shown at the exhibition

The exhibition brought together unmanned aircraft for strategic and tactical use, multirole and suicide types. Among them were the Saetbyol-4 and Saetbyol-9, which resemble the American Global Hawk and MQ-9 Reaper respectively, loitering munitions with a design recalling Israel’s Harop and Russia’s Lancet, and racks with hundreds of small quadcopters. The American site The War Zone reports that more than 30 types were reportedly shown and notes that some quadcopters appeared to carry cylindrical housings pointing to fibre-optic control, as used in Ukraine to escape jamming.

The mock-up of the large tailless drone has evident similarities to the American X-47B, the Chinese GJ-11 and the Russian S-70. There is no information on its engine, payload or performance, and it is not known whether it is a real programme. Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) in Seoul estimates, from the photographs, a wingspan of about 17 to 20 metres. KCNA images also show drones launching missiles and targets resembling South Korean front-line outposts and M1 Abrams tanks.

“Strength means peace”

“Strength is precisely peace, and peace is ensured only by strength. This is common sense for surviving in today’s noisy world,” Kim said, as rendered by Yonhap. He urged scientists to “give everything” for “miraculous results” in unmanned systems and artificial intelligence for national defence, “just as we obtained the status of a nuclear state and made new leaps in modernising conventional weapons”. He also called for unmanned technology to be expanded and strengthened quickly, without specifying what measures should be taken.

At his side were his daughter Kim Ju Ae, his wife Ri Sol Ju and Pak Jong Chon, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party. The exhibition comes at a time of tension on the border between the two Koreas, where in September three South Korean soldiers were injured by mines, with Pyongyang denying responsibility.