Egypt Uses Artillery From Both Koreas

North Korean artillery in the Arab world enjoys a heritage going back at least 50 years. The industrial footprint it has left is still seen with the Egyptian ground forces and their choice of short-range rocket launchers. At the EDEX 2023 arms show in Cairo a lot of fanfare surrounded the appearance of the Raad 200 (Thunder 200) manufactured by the National Organization for Military Production (NOMP). The new self-propelled rocket artillery system is an improvement over the army’s outdated Sakr-series launchers mounted on Soviet vintage ATS-59G tractors and Russian-made Ural trucks. The Raad 200 has a fully armored single cab and a bed mounting a launcher with 30 tubes.

Distinguishing the NOMP as the manufacturer of the Raad 200 is important as Egyptian rocket artillery is produced by the Sakr Factory for Developed Industries that’s under the Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI), a state-owned holding established in the late 1970s with funds from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Raad 200’s peculiar appearance stems from being a tracked vehicle with 10 road wheels on a torsion bar chassis the same as the original ATS-59G tractor. It does share a resemblance to the more sophisticated US-made M270 MLRS’ that are in service with the army and a recent system from China.

However, mounted on the Raad 200’s bed is a launcher carrying two racks of 15 tubes each. This is the configuration of North Korea’s original domestic variant of the Soviet vintage Grad called the BM-11. While North Korea’s had 30 tubes rather than the 40 tubes of the original it proved an export success. (By 2013 the Korean People’s Army introduced an updated Grad launcher with a fully armored cab and a 40 tube launcher.) Production was shared with Egypt and multiple units reached Libya and Pakistan during the 1980s. The variant assembled by the latter’s Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) features the same 30 tube configuration and a few were delivered to Azerbaijan.

The Sakr Factory for Developed Industries located outside Cairo maintains an active production line for 122mm rockets. Considering the army have scores of Soviet BM-21 Grad launchers why a 40 tube Sakr launcher was never introduced, when the same was done by Iran and Myanmar with their North Korean 122mm rocket launchers, is a question searching for an answer. Although Egypt’s current government downplays its relationship with North Korea it benefited from arm sales and other technical assistance since at least the 1970s. Beyond copycat Grad rockets produced by Sakr the Egyptian ballistic missile program had its heyday in the 1980s thanks to North Korea. According to declassified Cold War era intelligence reports it was in 1983 when Cairo and Pyongyang finalized multiple agreements for co-developing arms and Egypt agreed to transfer some Scud Bs from its own stocks.

Egypt’s inventory of Scud B ballistic missiles and FROG rockets were supplied by the Soviet Union before the October War (known as the Yom Kippur War in Israel) fought from October 6 until October 25, 1973, but Cairo never publicly acknowledged these weapons until 1976. As a lasting peace deal with Tel Aviv was being arranged Pyongyang had an uninterrupted influence on its largest client in the Arab world. The arrangement agreed upon in 1983 required Egypt to deliver Soviet-made Scud B’s to North Korea for reverse-engineering and the production will then be shared with an Egyptian factory. The ironic part is once “Scud C” missiles were developed for Egypt from 1984-1988 the North Koreans arranged exports of the same missiles to Iran, a country at war with Egypt’s close ally Iraq. Aside from this dalliance with Pyongyang during the 1980s the regime of Pres. Hosni Mubarak was trying to expand the military-industrial sector with the assistance of other foreign partners, including Pres. Saddam Hussein whose oil exports bankrolled a collaborative missile program with Argentina called “Vector.”

Egypt’s attempts at building up its surface-to-surface missile arsenal had few successes like the Sakr-80 large diameter battlefield rocket yet efforts by Argentina and North Korea at establishing production lines for advanced tactical missiles are deemed ambiguous. When it comes to artillery the Egyptian army boasts fielding the South Korean K9A1EGY 155mm self-propelled howitzer while it operates countless rocket launchers based on North Korean specifications. Regarding the Cairo-Seoul alliance it took years of government-to-government meetings before South Korea’s arms exports were possible. Depending on how financing and transfer-of-technology is arranged other high profile deals are likely being smoothed out for this decade.