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Friday, December 07, 2007

So Just the Kooks?

Earlier, I wrote about how North Korea's conventional military threat was evaporating, leading the regime to a reliance on their spies to control the country and nuclear weapons to prevent external attack. No matter how much the people suffered, the regime would survive along with its privileges. The Kooks, Spooks and Nukes strategy, as I called it.

Well, Strategypage has further news on North Korea:

The North Korean armed forces continue to be starved of resources. The troops get food, and some medicine, but not much else. Little fuel for tanks, ships and aircraft, so there is not much training. No new equipment, and less maintenance on the thirty year old stuff that is still in service.

The secret police, that keep a lid on things, are becoming less trustworthy. It's the corruption again. What happens when you can't trust the guards who guard the guards?


So the military continues its slide, becoming too weak to attack South Korea, too weak to even defend the country in the unlikely event it is attacked, and is perhaps too disloyal to suppress the people. They might only be strong enought to be a threat to the regime itself.

Yet the spies who are supposed to keep a lid on the people and watch the army for signs of disloyalty are losing their ability to be the pure regime guardians.

And North Korea appears to be giving up their nukes. Or they may only be giving up what we say we know about their programs and the North Koreans may cooperate by agreeing that we clever Americans know about all of it.

Still, given that neither we nor South Koreas was about to invade, nukes to guard against invasion was always a pointless goal for Pyongyang. It is just possible that the Pillsbury Nuke Boy finally realizes that simply having thousands of artillery pieces ready to bombard Seoul is more than enough deterrent against South Korean attack.

Still, the significant development is that the spy services are no longer as reliable. How much worse does that situation have to get before only the Kooks are left?

And will we see signs that the North Korean regime is starting to fear the army too much and lose their trust that their spies can control the army? If we see the regime start to disband army units and keep them away from the capital, that will be quite the sign of internal rot.