Over the last four years North Korea and Iran have used military technology they are not supposed to have. In the first weeks of Operation Epic Fury IRGC missiles managed to destroy most of the US bases in the Gulf, dodging the nominally invincible THAAD and Patriot interceptors and have flown thousands of drones against Israel’s defences that somehow can evade electronic warfare jamming that was very effective only a year earlier.

North Korea’s ballistic missiles have also come on by leaps and bounds. Pyongyang test-fired a medium-range hypersonic missile on October 3 that it says uses an artificial intelligence module to change course mid-flight, effectively jumping sideways to avoid interceptors. Iran has used the same kind of weapon, something even America doesn’t have.

Iran also fired a North Korean designed ballistic missile at the US naval base Diego Garcia, 4,000km from its shores – twice the distance that military analysis previously assumed its rockets could reach - using Kheibar missiles based on North Korean designs.

The anti-Western CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) has been beefing up their game and sharing advanced military technology that in many areas, like hypersonic missiles, have the lead over the best that the West has to offer. And that has delivered unpleasant surprises in the asymmetrical war that has been unfolding on the shores of the Persian Gulf and the wheatfields of the Donbas.

North Korea the big winner

Of the allies, North Korea is probably the most backward. However, it has gained a boost from Russia particularly, which has been buying millions of artillery shells of Soviet-era stock to supplement its own supplies, particularly in the first year of the Ukrainian conflict, and paid with cash and military grade weapons technology as well as badly needed commodities. More recently, Kim Jong Un has sent a reported 50,000 troops to bolster Russian forces in the Ukrainian fields. Pyongyang is enjoying a boom as a result of the money flooding into the pariah state’s capital.

Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong-un and a department head in the ruling Workers' Party, said the missile's "wave trajectory mode" made it swerve erratically and drop off enemy radar. "In other words, this means it will be impossible to avoid an attack," she said, according to state news agency KCNA. Pyongyang says the system has four flight algorithms and an AI module that manoeuvres in real time, so that an interceptor such as the SM-3 or Patriot PAC-3 cannot calculate where to meet it.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile, launched from the Wonsan area, flew "more than 700 km"; Japan's defence ministry said about 680 km. North Korea claims 1,000 km and says the gap shows the allied radars lost the missile. If that is true, a manoeuvring hypersonic weapon with that range puts the US and Japanese naval bases at Sasebo and Iwakuni within reach, and possibly Guam. It is also possible Pyongyang is dressing up a failed flight as a breakthrough.

Drone tech boost

Already the technology is flowing back the other way as Russia is sharing its recently battle-tested innovations with its CRINK partners.

The test came a day before President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had shared its new jet-powered drone technology with North Korea. Initially Russia bought the kamikaze Shahed drones in large numbers from Iran at the start of the Ukraine war, but in 2025 it did a technology transfer deal with Tehran and built a vast drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan. Since then it has poured money into development and recently retired its Geran-2 and -3 drones, prop-driven models based on the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition and replaced them with the much more advanced Geran-4 jet powered version as well as the cruise-missile light Geran-5 and Banderol missiles both of which can outrun Ukraine’s new interceptor missiles, drastically reducing Ukraine’s interception rates.

Asked whether Moscow had passed on this technology at a press conference last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said: "Yes, of course. They're sharing with North Korea all the technologies." He said he believed Russia was also helping with ballistic missiles, "because North Korea helped them with missiles. It's a very dangerous moment."

There is also hard evidence of Russia transferring air-defence and electronic-warfare technology to North Korea, according to the 11-country Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team in May last year. Russia has supplied North Korea with at least one Pantsir mobile air-defence system, a Pantsir-class combat vehicle and electronic-warfare jamming equipment after North Korean troops began deploying to Russia. South Korea's national security adviser separately said Russia had supplied anti-aircraft missiles and equipment and was assisting Pyongyang's satellite programme.

Experts say that Ukraine is being used by Pyongyang as a live-fire R&D laboratory for North Korean missiles, according to analysis by 38 North which examined the North Korean- made KN-23 missiles Russia has fired in Ukraine; early missiles reportedly suffered accuracy and reliability problems; later examples performed significantly better.

China is doing the same thing: Russia's IEMZ Kupol working with Chinese specialists in China to develop and flight-test the Garpiya-3/G3 long-range attack drone, Reuters reported, and sample Chinese-produced drones have repeatedly been found on the battlefield in Ukraine. Separately, a Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) study also found China and Hong Kong to be important sources of drone-engine components, electronics and manufacturing equipment used by Iran and Russia.

That is a problem for Ukraine as it heads into a winter campaign that was always going to be brutal. Ukraine has also been pouring money into development and has developed jet-powered interceptor missiles and reportedly used its home-grown FP-7 ballistic missiles against a Russian target for the first time last week.

But Russia's missile arsenal is already growing far faster than Ukraine's air defences, as Kyiv’s interceptor stocks run dry, and Russia has been supplementing its own stockpile of a reported 130 ballistic missiles with North Korean made munitions. A week earlier Zelenskiy warned that Moscow was also preparing to recruit another 10,000 North Korean military personnel to fight in Ukraine during what is widely expected to be a devasting winter campaign.

Russia aiding Iran

The exchange is part of a wider transfer of weapons technology between the members of the informal CRINK bloc which the Iran war has pushed into an open closer military cooperation.

Iran’s drone technology has improved remarkably in just a year since its last exchange with Israel in 2025. Russia is apparently helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles the Financial Times reported in September after an investigation uncovered a covert programme called C430L, running since 2023, involving Rosoboronexport and Russia's NPO Mashinostroyenia.

Leaked correspondence, travel records and military patents showed Russian engineers analysing Iranian ramjet flight-test telemetry and advising on fuel delivery, combustion stability, air intakes and engine nozzles. In April 2025 Rosoboronexport proposed sending roughly two dozen Russian specialists to Iran for technical consultations, the paper reported, and the programme was still active in 2026.

This is not simply selling Tehran a missile: it is transferring the knowledge needed for Iran eventually to design and manufacture its own supersonic anti-ship and land-attack weapons that can match anything the US has.

And it’s not just materiel they are sharing. In September Pyongyang ran its first exercise mixing attack drones with missiles, rockets and artillery against a single target, borrowing tactics Russia has gleaned from its campaign in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The Iran war highlights how far this cooperation has gone. Iran fielded a hypersonic missile, a technology the US does not yet have, and its missiles repeatedly penetrated Patriot defences. In a stunning development by late March US troops had been forced out of all 13 of their Gulf bases, the backbone of the US security umbrella for the region, most of them left all but uninhabitable, according to The New York Times.

Iranian drones have also become a lot more effective after it abandoned GPS after its 12-day war with Israel in 2025 and switched to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, which improved accuracy and helped its drones beat Israeli electronic warfare. Russia has in turn supplied Iran back with its own innovative drone technology advances developed at Alabuga, along with satellite intelligence, during its war with the US and Israel.

Sanctions force Russia to innovate

Beyond weapons, sanctions have forced Russia to build what it used to import, and China has been its main supplier. It started with cheese, after Putin banned the import of European agricultural products in 2014; almost all the high quality cheese on Russian shelves was imported from Europe, but as the shelves cleared within two years, Russia was forced to bootstrap a domestic cheese industry that have subsequently flourish.

More challengingly, Siemens had a near-monopoly on high-efficiency gas turbines for Russian power plants until it left in 2022; Power Machines is now shipping its own 155 MW GTE-170.1 turbines and United Engine Corporation is testing a 25 MW industrial model that is reportedly on a par with the best German machines.

Most recently, Russia now has 16 companies making robots that are entirely domestic it was reported this month, in a field where China is far ahead of the rest of the world and Russia has never featured before as a player. In microchips, its most advanced domestic production is still at a crude 90 nanometres, but in May it unveiled its first home-built lithography machine, working at 350nm, good enough for the radiation-hardened chips used in missiles but decades behind the US and China, which recently amassed over 300 advanced machinery from Holland’s ASML to supply itself with 7nm chips for years to come.

Russian missiles once depended on Western chips, with US components making up about 95% of the electronics in some of them, many smuggled in or scavenged from household appliances. A Russian reconnaissance drone recovered in Ukraine was found to be built almost entirely on Chinese chips, and around 80% of the critical electronics in Russian drones are now Chinese, which helped Russia lift Iskander output to 60-70 missiles a month.

Russia has also launched Rassvet, its answer to Starlink, drawing on its long-standing space programme. Deployment has been rocky, with none of the 16 satellites launched in July reaching their planned orbit by the end of August, but Bureau 1440 has already started work on a next generation, and the Kremlin wants the constellation to give its forces their own communications network across the theatre.

However, both China and Russia have been making use of their existant satellite network to provide Iran with real time intelligence. Reuters reported an Ukrainian intelligence assessment saying Russian satellites made at least 24 detailed surveys between March 21 and March 31 of 46 targets in 11 Middle Eastern countries, including US bases, airports and oil installations, during the Iran missile onslaught against US gulf bases in the first stage of the Gulf war.

A military circle is beginning to turn. Iran supplied the Shahed concept to Russia; Russia industrialised it and developed more sophisticated derivatives; Chinese components and manufacturing technology enabled a rapid scaling up of production; operational experience in Ukraine produced refinements; and some of that knowledge now appears to be moving on to North Korea and back to Iran. The direction of the. tech transfer is no longer one-way.

Still, the gap with the leading global defence firms is still measured in decades in many fields. But for the first time since the Soviet collapse, Russia is building the machines that make the machines, and its partners in Pyongyang and Tehran are sharing the results. What is emerging is not just "technology transfer" but an emerging “wartime innovation network” amonst four of the most militarised nations in the world.