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I’ve been gunning through the final pages of Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Heavenly Father: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, blowing through the sections about potential wartime scenarios between the two rival Koreas.

Martin’s chats with North Korean defectors have been extremely revealing. His several interviewees, the majority of them former staff members of the DPRK’s million-man army, offer up their experience on why North Korea might have the decisive edge over the more affluent south if push comes to shove and the guns suddenly start to rumble.

I’ll list some the more compelling bits (sorry, I hate this word, but I couldn’t think of anything better) which I’d read about yesterday:

• comparative training regimes: the prevailing opinion amongst North Korea’s military higher-ups and amongst its frontline soldiers is that their southern cousins are “soft around the middle.” Affluence and widespread capitalism has made the ROK’s army weaker, and northerners will have the edge in hand-to-hand conflict because they have so much more to gain by fighting. North Korea maintains training facilities for its senior espionage troops where the latter are steeped in Southern lifestyles, ways, and culture which they will use in infiltrating the South from within, ripping its guts out from the inside. The installations are one-quarter scale models of Seoul streets, complete with real South Korean money, people, and music, and where spies are taught to speak with Southern accents and to dress with Southern clothes in order to blend in seamlessly. Their indoctrination is quite frightening, actually.
• Northern victory — assuming the Americans (and the Chinese) don’t get involved: North Korean officers are taught to believe that what saved the South during the Korean War was the timely involvement of the joint UN/US expeditionary force, which pulled the rabbit out of the proverbial hat for Syngman’s ROK army. Provided the DMZ-occupying US Army keeps out of any future conflict, the North is convinced that a swift military victory will be theirs.
• the next “Korean War” will be far bloodier and costlier than the 1950’s conflict: Pyongyang knows the South has a significantly lower tolerance for the casualties and havoc a war will wreak on its society. The South – as one of the world’s preeminent globalized economies – has so much more to lose in this conflict than does the North. Given modern-day weapons of warfare, if push comes to shove, the destruction caused by a future “Korean War” will be catastrophic, much more so than the previous battle on the peninsula.
• food – or lack of it — will play a decisive factor in a future conflict: Kim Jong-il (aka Bam Bam) and the DPRK’s staff higher-ups know how strong a motivator food can be to their mainline fighters. Troops in North Korea’s army have seen what the chronic lack of access to basic foodstuffs has tragically caused to their parents and families. By rumbling massively across the border into the South, they are well-aware of the plentiful food stocks located just a few short miles across the DMZ. Food will be one of the primary motivators towards violent reunification, the prize at the end of the line in any future intra-Korean war. Food will propel North Korea’s troops southward. As for the South? What do they have to find on the northern side of the DMZ? Northern land – for the most part – is unarable. DPRK has no known natural resources other than its people. It imports most of its industry’s key inputs. DPRK society is deeply indoctrinated. All the South can look forward to is spending money in North Korea, rather than plundering its spoils and turning a wartime profit. You see where this is headed?

• artillery shelling will also play a decisive role in any future conflict: Have a look at the map above and note how close the South Korean capital, Seoul, is to the DMZ. North Korea has spent the past several decades digging itself into the cliffs overlooking the DMZ and ROK’s major cities a few miles south of the border. Since they own the high ground, all the North needs to do it lob its artillery shells over the border to just wait out the South’s eventual collapse; that is, presuming the Americans don’t get involved and air power does not turn the tides of the battle on the field.
• comparative training regimens: In North Korea, the grunts are subjected to arduously long hikes that seem to never end. They suffer from poor sanitation in their barracks and also in the field. Their heavily-soiled clothing and uniforms are seldom replaced (once every two years for their winter outfits, twice every year in the summer). Their food is just a grade above starvation rations. Their entire ten years of service can basically be said to be marked by abject privations and such a stark deprivation that it profoundly affects their way of thinking. Moreover, over the course of ten years, North Korea’s troops have zero sexual outlet. Homosexuality is rampant amongst North Korea’s military ranks. So the thought of millions of defeated, pure-blooded South Korean women dangling food and awaiting them just across the border acts as a colossally strong incentive to win, and quickly.
• better to die in battle than to die of hunger: further to our food discussion; food is used manipulatively by the regime to affect the troops’ thinking. Given the limited access to supplies in North Korea – even for its army – soldiers are compelled to steal from citizens to survive. The ten years of a soldier’s service is characterized by theft and violence just to get by. South Korean troops, meanwhile, enjoy ample rations with snacks (one of Martin’s interviewees emphasized this). DPRK troops would prefer to take their chances rather than die suffering in North Korea.
• in North Korea, everyone is mentally-prepared for war: the constant drumbeat to war sounds daily in Pyongyang. The current “Dear Leader”” Kim Jong-il is the military lightning rod of the nation, whipping up his troops and citizens into constant fits of frantic frenzy about US imperialism, the dangerous threat of becoming a US flunky, and the threat that capitalist South Korean culture will have on the “pre-eminence” of their North Korean society. There are few moments in the day when North Koreans aren’t reminded of this potential calamity. If the South wins, North Korea – as most North Koreans today recognize it – will completely cease to exist. Loss to the South is therefore wholly unconscionable.

The experts, on balance, seem undecided about the outcome of a future war. But once we lay out the facts on the table as we have above, things come into clearer focus.

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