North Korea’s Shell Game Is Not a Game-Changer, Pentagon Says

The U.S. Department of Defense is concerned about Russia’s growing artillery partnership with North Korea after Russian President Vladimir Putin met the Hermit Kingdom’s leader earlier this month to sign new production contracts to support the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but U.S. officials and congressional aides don’t see the provision of more ammo to the Kremlin as a game-changer in the war.

U.S. defense officials have declined to put a ballpark number on North Korea’s ammunition production capacity, solely characterizing it as “relatively substantial.” But the Pentagon sees the deal between Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a sign that the Kremlin will continue to seek to reach outside of U.S.-connected markets to resupply its military as Western sanctions continue to bite.

“It’s not a game-changer,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters while traveling to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Ramstein earlier this month.

The deal is more reflective of the Kremlin’s desperation. A onetime superpower that channeled arms to North Korea decades ago to help the poorer country wage war against its neighbor, Russia today finds itself going cap-in-hand to meet the leader of one of the most destitute countries in the world to fill gaps in its own battered defense industrial base.

“The bigger point for me is that Putin had to travel 11 time zones to beg Kim Jong Un for artillery ammunition,” said Ben Hodges, a retired lieutenant general who served as head of the U.S. Army in Europe. “How bad is it in Russia if that’s the case?” (Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the Russian city where the meeting took place, is seven times zones to the east of Moscow).

The senior U.S. defense official said that North Korea’s substantial stocks and healthy production capability would help Russia sustain its cannon-heavy form of warfare as the planned lightning strike on Ukraine drags into its second winter. “Certainly, it’s offering Russia an option to be able to sustain its operations in light of the very successful sanctions and export restrictions that were really creating problems for Russian production and [the] Russian defense industry,” the official said.

Russian forces have had to conserve ammunition since the winter due to unsustainably high rates of fire in 2022, the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To that extent, Pyongyang can give Russia back some of its bite, said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “North Korea may have categories of ammunition that Russia has run out of or can’t produce at high rates,” he said.

Both Ukraine—backed by the West—and Russia—backed by North Korea, Iran, and to a lesser extent China—are trying to fill the weapons gap after 19 months of grinding warfare. Both sides are scrambling to find not only more 155 mm shells, the NATO standard, but also the older 152 mm ammunition that was a Soviet bloc staple, but which is in shorter supply today.

The U.S. defense industry has doubled the production of 155 mm ammunition in the past six months, on a path to produce 100,000 shells per month by late 2025. But that won’t be enough to keep up, as Ukraine is firing about 6,000 rounds a day, so the United States is also scouring Western arsenals to dig up more Soviet-type ammunition. Ukrainian officials say that they have fired so much NATO-standard artillery that they had begun to wear out new 155 mm artillery barrels that arrived from the United States and Western countries even before the counteroffensive began in June.

The European Union has emerged as a major buyer of ammunition since February, and the bloc plans to reach capacity to produce about 1 million shells a year within the next 12 months. Still, Russia’s artillery production is also increasing significantly, to about 2 million shells annually, Reuters reported earlier this month.

It’s not the first time during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the Russians have gone outside the former Soviet Union to seek military help from countries that the Biden administration sees as like-minded with the Kremlin, a sign U.S. defense officials take to mean that Putin is unlikely to give up on the military campaign any time soon. Iran previously provided Russia with 300,000 artillery shells, about two months worth of production, as well as drones. China has not offered large-scale defense assistance, but has made available advanced defense components that were otherwise off-limits to Russia due to Western sanctions. “They’re switching to Chinese components wherever they can,” said one congressional aide briefed on the matter, who could only speak on condition of anonymity.

The far-flung merchants of war and their growing involvement in re-arming both sides could end up expanding the scope of the global showdown. South Korea has begun to provide artillery to Ukraine, a program that Seoul hopes to expand in 2024. But while Russia may be a beggar for much-needed defense material now, it still has a lot of high-tech armament to offer to countries that could threaten Western allies and partners.

“Putin is subtly signaling to Seoul that it should tread carefully in supporting Ukraine, lest he opens the Russian defense technology toolkit to [North Korea],” said Peter Rough, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “The same applies to Israel and Iran.”

Correction, Sept. 29, 2023: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Putin and Kim met in North Korea. The meeting took place in Russia’s Far East.