The army was the loser in this scheme but without money, something had to give, and it wasn't going to be the privileges of the elites.
With reports of a new nuclear test out there, the nukes pillar is still an objective.
But even the spooks proved insufficient, and the North Korean elites stripped some of their best remaining competent troops to reinforce the spies.
This move, apparently, is just a sign of the restoration of the military as the pillar of support for the elites:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has apparently selected his youngest (25 year old Kim Jong Un) son as his successor. As the first step in this process, Kim Jong Un has been appointed to a low ranking job with the National Defense Commission (or NDC), where he can be rapidly promoted over a few years to give him some "experience." But his father, Kim Jong Il, does not look long for this world. So an interim government, composed of a committee of generals and security officials, will rule as regent until Kim Jong Un is considered old enough to take over. That might be never, because North Korea is not expected to last much longer. Unless the leadership up north can reverse the economic and social decline, the North Korean police state is just going to collapse. The NDC is run by the generals, and has also had most intelligence operations of the communist party transferred to them. This weakens the communist party, while making the generals more powerful. Apparently, the leadership up north (which basically represents a few percent of the population) believes that their best chance of survival is with the generals, not the communist politicians. The communist party had previously controlled two intel agencies, which kept an eye on the south (as well as some people in the north.) But now the communist party has fewer eyes, and the generals have more.
The spies seem to be losing out. But remember that the military lost out in the power play before because the army cost too much to maintain relative to the costs of spies and nuclear weapons. How can the elites rely on the army when the army is still too poor to be a pillar of the regime? Is just moving the spooks to army control more than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
I'd feel better about the impending regime collapse if the world wasn't spending so much on stimulus spending. How will we help South Korea with the costs of that collapse? A price that will be huge even if no war results should the North Korean elites try to roll the dice by trying to attack South Korea.
