Sure they’re old school but … How much damage do they cause?
Fire an arrow at an enemy with a crossbow
The enemy: spitting blood “lol that’s so outdated techn…” die
That’s not the point, it’s more like
- Fire an arrow at an enemy wearing full plate armour and carrying a crossbow
- Arrow bounces off armour
- “lol that’s so outdated” shoots you back with a crossbow
Sure, you could get lucky and hit a gap in the armour, but what you’re doing is wildly inefficient. As stated in the article, a bunch of the north korean missiles are detonating before reaching their targets, and they’re also very inaccurate. Just like in the arrow/armour analogy, it’s not like they’re useless and can’t cause harm, it’s that they’re wildly ineffective compared to modern missiles.
More importantly, the point is the state of russian (+ allies) manufacturing capabilities. If they were capable of fielding enough modern weapons, they wouldn’t be using outdated and inefficient ones. Sure, you can arm modern soldiers with swords and crossbows, and they can probably kill people with them. However, you’re going to choose firearms and grenades 10/10 times if you can.
Kyiv first reported the use of the KN-23 in January of [2024], saying that Russia had launched the missiles at Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials said at the time that the munitions were highly inaccurate and unreliable, with at least half exploding in the air before reaching their targets.
If that’s true then it really is a case of them being so poorly-made that it seriously reduces the damage that they can cause
good enough.
