A South Korean news agency reports that North Korea has started outfitting its navy with gatling guns—American gatling guns, at least according to defense officials in Seoul.

The Yonhap News Agency report says gatling guns have been showing up on North Korean border patrol boats. Those vessels have been involved in several skirmishes with their South Korean counterparts, but typically they are second-best when they go up against the more modern, better equipped navy in the south. The guns in question are speculated to be American-made GAU-19/A gatling guns. Made by General Dynamics, the GAU-19/A is a three-barreled, .50 caliber machine gun that can fire 2,000 rounds per minute. It has an effective range of just over a mile.

Pin North Korean patrol boat.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It's clear why Kim Jong-un would want these guns, but are North Korea's new arms the real deal? Not likely. The GAU-19/A is used by only five countries: the United States, Oman, Japan, Colombia, and Mexico. None of those countries are particularly friendly to North Korea, making even an under-the-table acquisition improbable. Even if North Korea acquired some of the guns, it would need spare parts and .50 caliber ammunition the country doesn't manufacture.

Most Popular

The new gun could be a Yak-B gatling gun , an older Soviet design that uses the right ammunition and has a fourth barrel. Alternately, it could be a scaled-up version of the Chinese-made Hua Qing gatling gun . Although China has an official policy against arming its southern neighbor, the two share a long border and smuggling is rampant.

If this is indeed an American gun, the country may have gotten it indirectly: North Korea could have gotten its hands on older GAU-2/A miniguns from Vietnam, which probably had some left over from the Vietnam War, and built their own copies. It's also possible that this is an indigenous design that uses 12.7-millimeter machine gun ammunition.

Whatever the case, it's unlikely the gun will see much use across the North Korean military. Miniguns have a voracious appetite for ammunition, and North Korea is still essentially a poor country. Pyongyang most likely would outfit only a handful of its best patrol boats for use in future skirmishes with Seoul.