Latest on the Norks

The North Korea-in-Kursk situation is getting complicated. North Korean performance has improved considerably, and since the Kursk operation has largely ended it’s an open question whether elements of the Korean People’s Army will be deployed to other sectors of the front. The more interesting questions are long-term, however:

But the long-term impact of the deployment on North Korean military effectiveness depends on the ability of the KPA to incorporate lessons learned during the fighting into its own systems of training and doctrine.

Incorporating foreign learning is a complicated process, because it usually involves taking the lessons learned from a small contingent and applying those to the force as a whole. This can run afoul of bureaucratic politics, established hierarchies, and relationships with other parts of the state. The KPA is thought to operate largely on the Soviet model of training and modernization, a model which often moves slowly but that nonetheless has historically been able to incorporate lessons learned during fighting.

North Korean conventional forces have often been overlooked in comparison to the DPRK’s nuclear and missile capabilities, largely because Pyongyang made a decision decades ago that it could not compete conventionally with the United States and South Korea. When the KPA does come up it is usually in reference to its large stock of artillery, which could devastate Seoul and provides a powerful deterrent to South Korea and the US. The North Korean economy probably cannot sustain a large-scale conventional military modernization program, but improvements in lethality are still worth tracking, especially as the promise of long-term Russian support for Pyongyang helps guarantee the regime’s survival prospects. 

Some other links:

• On cyber escalation…
• The key to combating drones is finding ways to shoot them down *cheaply*…
• The rise and fall of warhorses…
• France as the nuclear protector of Europe (De Gaulle smiles)…