Winning: Dwindling Options In North Korea-Strategy Page

Winning: Dwindling Options In North Korea-Strategy Page

NK has much less military capability than it did 50 years ago, but it still can make a dangerous nuisance of itself. We can only hope and pray that the NK regime will gradually fade away peacefully and never ever decide to go for broke and attack south. Because no matter who wins a Second Korean War, it will be a bloody mess.

May 13, 2015: What military options does North Korea have? Not many, but North Korea remains a major threat to its southern neighbor and nearby Japan because of the few military options it does have. For nearly 70 years North Korea has called for unification of Korea, under their terms and by force if necessary. They tried it once in 1950 and failed catastrophically. During the Cold War they built and maintained armed forces that were considered a serious threat to South Korea, but the possibility of American intervention and the very public threat of the U.S. going nuclear held the North Koreans back. The American nuclear threat also caused China and Russia, who backed the 1950 invasion, to persuade the North Koreans to forget about another invasion unless their two big allies agreed to it.When the Cold War ended and Russian subsidies disappeared the country went into an economic depression that led to over a million North Koreans starving to death. While the troops were fed, they no longer received new equipment or sufficient money and supplies (especially fuel) to maintain the equipment or the combat capabilities of the troops. To make up for that North Korea put what little resources it had into developing better ballistic missiles and chemical weapons. Most importantly they developed nuclear weapons. These are crude, according to data from the few nuclear tests so far. There is one other new weapon the north has developed that might prove decisive and that is the growing North Korean Cyber War force. Developed slowly since the 1980s in the last few years the North Korean hackers have proved themselves to be quite competent and a growing number of effective hacking operations have been carried out (mostly in in South Korea and Japan). South Korea and American military planners are scrambling to get a more accurate idea of just how effective these North Korean Cyber Warriors would be in wartime. The combination of hacking, nukes, chemical weapons and surprise might enable North Korea to grab the South Korea capital (Seoul) and enough of South Korea to make a peace deal possible. It’s a long shot and once you look into the details you see that it is a more dangerous option of the North Korean leadership (who would be declared war criminals) and the North Korean people in general (because of possible nuclear retaliation).
Meanwhile the main, if no longer decisive, threat remains North Korean conventional forces. Some 70 percent of North Korean ground forces are within a hundred kilometers of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone, the border with the south.) This was long the main threat to South Korea but two decades of money, fuel and food shortages have greatly reduced North Korean Army capabilities. Two decades of extreme poverty have done even more damage to the navy and air force.
The Inmun Gun (the North Korean armed forces) looks scary on paper, in large part because nearly every adult male serves at least six years in the military. The big problem is that years of economic problems and failed harvests have left the troops poorly equipped, often hungry and increasingly insubordinate. With most of the best educated troops bribing their way into any job but one in a combat unit it is increasingly doubtful if the North Korean combat forces could get very far during an invasion of South Korea. Despite all that a lot of North Korean troops are believed to be reliable enough to carry out orders to invade South Korea, for a while at least, and that could end up doing a lot of damage to Seoul (the southern capital where half the population and a quarter of the GDP are). South Koreans have more to lose than the northerners if the invasion order is given.