North Korea Massively Increases Its Special Forces

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

North Korea has been massively increasing its special forces in recent years:

The cash-strapped government of Kim Jong Il, which struggles to maintain and buy fuel for its aging tanks and armor, has concluded it cannot win a conventional war, according to U.S. and South Korean military officials.

But by combining huge numbers of special forces with artillery that can devastate Seoul and missiles that can pound all of South Korea, North Korea has found an affordable way to remain terrifying, ensure regime survival and deter a preemptive strike on the nuclear bombs that make it a player on the world stage, say U.S. and South Korean military analysts.

Further, their training has shifted to terrorist tactics developed by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan:

In a conflict, tens of thousands of special forces members would try to infiltrate South Korea: by air in radar-evading biplanes, by ground through secret tunnels beneath the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and by sea aboard midget submarines and hovercraft, according to South Korean and U.S. military analysts.

Disguised in the uniforms of South Korean police and military personnel, special forces are also expected to try to walk into Seoul. Dressed as civilians, they may also arrive aboard passenger flights from Beijing and other foreign capitals.

“These are not your standard North Korean guys,” Bechtol said. “They are the best-trained, best-fed and most indoctrinated soldiers in the North. They know how to fight, and if they are caught, they are trained to kill themselves.”

Their primary mission, in the event of war, is to leapfrog the DMZ and create chaos among the 20.5 million residents of greater Seoul, while harassing South Korean and U.S. forces in rear areas, military and intelligence experts said.

There’s some debate about how special many of these special forces really are:

The number is now 180,000, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry. That’s a 50 percent increase since the South’s last official count three years ago. But Sharp, the U.S. commander here, puts the number at 80,000 (although that still dwarfs the special forces of any country, including the United States, which has about 51,000.)

Much of the difference appears to be a dispute over the definition of special forces. North Korea has retrained and reconfigured about 60,000 infantry troops as special forces in the past three years, South Korea says. The United States agrees that this reconfiguring has occurred, but it “does not count [retrained infantry] as special forces,” according to Maj. Todd Fleming, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Korea.

From this description, I’m not sure if they’re training for a war or a war movie:

Their low-tech, low-cost training includes throwing knives, firing poisonous darts and running up steep hills wearing backpacks filled with 60 pounds of rocks and sand, said Ha Tae-jun, a former South Korean commando who has debriefed captured members of the North’s special forces. They are also drilled in street warfare, chemical attacks, night fighting, martial arts, car theft and using spoons and forks as weapons, say South Korean government reports and military experts.

The North Korean special forces have a history of showing fighting spirit:

In 1968, a 31-member team attacked Blue House, the presidential residence in Seoul. Although they failed to assassinate President Park Chung-hee, they killed 68 South Koreans over the nine days it took to track them down. Several commandos committed suicide to avoid capture, one was unaccounted for and one was taken alive.

A Mumbai-style attack on Seoul certainly seems within their reach.

Comments

  1. They shouldn’t be called “special forces”. They should be called Sturmmann grouped into Sturmtruppen like the German soldiers trained in the so-called “Hutier Tactics” during the First World War. The Bombay attack relied on a surprise raid launched from the sea during peacetime. I don’t know if the infiltration of 50,000-100,000 storm troopers across a heavily fortified and mined frontier would achieve the same level of system-wide surprise.

  2. Isegoria says:

    My understanding is that the North Koreans are shifting from WWII-era commando tactics to modern insurgent tactics. So, rather than storm the frontier with 100,000 troops, they might sneak in a few dozen companies, each capable of carrying out a bigger version of the Mumbai attack, not just attacking unarmed civilians, but knocking out power plants, railways, bridges, ports, etc.

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