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Today, the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea's state news organization) announced the successful test of a new coastal defense cruise missile system, inflicting pain and woe on a target barge designed to represent a US "battleship." The missile, a knockoff of the Kh-35 cruise missile Russia exported in the 1990s to India and Vietnam, is notable mostly for its new tracked launcher. That means the associated crew no longer has to sit in a hardened battery packaged for instantaneous destruction and can instead wander freely about the coastline in hopes of popping off a shot or two before getting annihilated.

"This new-type cruise rocket is a powerful attack means capable of striking any enemy group of battleships attempting at military attack on the DPRK from the ground at will," reported KCNA. The test, of course, was overseen personally by Respected Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. "The test-fire was aimed to confirm its tactical and engineering data and technical specifications and verify the combat application efficiency of the overall weapon system, including the rocket and caterpillar self-propelled launching pad vehicle."

The target barge shown in photos was what appears to be a converted former North Korean patrol boat hull, with scaffolding festooned with radar reflectors to make it as big a target as possible to the radar seekers on the four missiles. At least one of the missiles appears, based on photos, to have found the target. There may have been other targets as well, as KCNA reports, "The launched cruise rockets accurately detected and hit the floating targets on the East Sea of Korea [the Sea of Japan] after making circular flights."

According to a statement by South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, the missiles flew at a peak altitude of about 2 km (1.24 miles)—not exactly a "sea skimming" course, although the missiles appear to have dropped down to low altitude once the targets were detected.

The test, KCNA claimed, "examined the flying safety under the zero-feet long-distance cruise flight system, mobility in various flying courses, target capture and guidance accuracy of the composite guided head, identification ability and sharp transition to altitude at the time of advance into the target." In other words, the missiles flew several different search patterns, then went down on the deck to hit their targets.

Just how much of a threat this system would pose to US and South Korean naval forces is not clear. The active seeker would likely be easily detected by shipboard electronic warfare gear, and the high altitude of the search mode would make it an easy target for anti-air missile systems on US destroyers. The missile itself is roughly equivalent in capability to the US Navy's venerable Harpoon missile system, so it could do significant damage.

If anything, the test—which came on the heels of the presence of the carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan in the Sea of Japan a few days earlier—was more about demonstrating that North Korea could maybe possibly hit a US ship if it came in too close to North Korean territorial waters using something mounted on a semi-armored tractor. But as Ankit Panda of The Diplomat pointed out, this is also the fourth new weapons system that North Korea has tested and declared ready for production in four months. Those actions at least show that North Korea is aggressively developing its missile capabilities in all sorts of ways.

Listing image by KCNA