The True Military Power of North Korea. Donald Trump
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2. Information, Influence, and Coordination Within the North Korean Leadership Structure.
North Korea employs a highly inflexible Sovietstyle military doctrine which emphasizes decisions being made at the top and carefully scripted war plans (which no one outside of North Korea has seen), discouraging operational flexibility and initiative. Hence, we deliberately list control before command.
Minister of People’s Armed Forces (MPAF). The MPAF is responsible for management and operational control of the armed forces. Prior to 1992, it was under the direct control of the president, with guidance from the NDC and the KWP Military Affairs Department. The 1992 state constitution shifted its control to the NDC. The minister of the PAF officially comes next in the chain of command of North Korea’s armed forces after the NDC, but his office has no control over policymaking or decision-making in the KPA. See Figure 3 for this peacetime command and control structure.
The MPAF, in peacetime, has responsibility for matters such as the procurement of weapons, defense research and development, intelligence-gathering, and military training. Foreign exchanges and liaison is the province of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The armed forces have little input into this area, although they are consulted. Even when direct military talks occur between North Korea and another state, the military participants are closely briefed as to what they may say by the KWP hierarchy.
Source: Ken Gause, North Korean Civil-Military Trends, September 2006, p. 19.
Figure 3. North Korean Military Command and Control.
North Korea’s military structure combines elements of those of China and the former Soviet Union, with the General Staff organizationally under the command of MPAF; functionally, however, the two are separated. In peacetime, MPAF takes charge of military administration, while the General Staff is responsible for operational command. During wartime, the Supreme Commander would exercise both military administration and operational control directly through the General Staff, bypassing MPAF. This dual chain of command ensures that only Kim Jong Il in his capacity as Supreme Commander is able to take the military command at anytime, regardless of peacetime or wartime.
MPAF has a single command system: the Chief of the General Staff has direct command over the Ground Forces corps (artillery corps, tank corps, and light infantry), the Naval command and the Air Defense command. In order that no high-ranking military officer can conspire with another to topple Kim Jong Il, the present structure forces each one to stand alone and to take control and punishment from the supreme commander.
To ensure political control, a secondary control and command path extends down via a separate chain-of-command to the lowest-levels of the KPA. The General Staff’s Department’s Operations Bureau is responsible for all operational aspects of the KPA, including broad-spectrum planning for the Air Force and the Navy, as well as paramilitary units. It is in direct contact with KPA Supreme Commander Kim Jong Il, and in the event of emergency, Kim can bypass the chain of command and issue orders directly to the Operations Bureau.
Two secondary paths exist to ensure political control of the KPA. The first extends through the KWP Central Committee to the Central Military Committee and to the General Political Bureau subordinate to the NDC. From the General Political Bureau, it extends down via a separate chain-of-command to the lowest levels of the KPA. The second extends from the NDC to the State Security Department. This department controls the MPAF’s Security Command, which also maintains representatives to the lowest-level of the KPA.
If North Korea exercised its mandate of unifying the peninsula under the military option, the MPAF probably would establish two or three army commands to control corps combat operations. These army commands could be responsible for East Coast, West Coast, and Central offensive operations crossing over the DMZ.
MPAF has been relegated to managing the peacetime administrative and logistic functions of the KPA, while the NDC is the wartime command and the General Staff Department probably would run the war, all lead by Kim Jong Il.
WMD Weapon Control and Command. Information concerning the specific control and command of WMD is vague and unclear due to the newness of this aspect of the KPA. The control and command of chemical and nuclear weapon usage probably falls directly under of Kim Jong Il for the initial application of these weapons through the General Staff of MPAF. Subordinate to the General Staff is the Nuclear-Chemical Defense Bureau, which is responsible for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (NBC) defense within the KPA and the production, distribution, and storage of chemical weapons and defensive equipment.
North Korea’s military control, command, and communications system consists of extensive hardened wartime command facilities, fiber-optic cable, and digital switching stations. This network is supported by redundant communication systems, which are believed to be largely separate from systems supporting other sectors of North Korea such as industry and government.
Conventional Forces
Origins and Evolution. The 20th century history of Korea is essential to understanding North Korea’s national objectives. Until the end of World War II in 1945, Korea remained a single, ethnically and culturally homogenous — but not independent — country for over 1,000 years. Korea initially was divided on a “temporary” basis by the United States and the Soviet Union along the 38th parallel to facilitate the surrender and demobilization of occupying Japanese forces in Korea. The separation of the Koreas resulted in a split between communism and democracy/capitalism, both tempered by fighting the injustices from the colonization of Korea by the Japanese.
The origins of the KPA are a fusion of Koreans fighting in China for the Chinese Revolution and against Japanese aggression (Yanan faction); the Koreans fighting the Japanese in Manchuria under the control of the Soviets (Kaspan faction); and the Koreans fighting Japanese colonialism on the Korean peninsula as well as each other for control in Korea after the Korean War.
The birth of the KPA can be established probably in 1936 when the Korean Fatherland Restoration Association (KFRA) was established to create a united front organization of anti-Japanese Koreans operating in Manchuria. On June 4, 1937, Kim Il Sung led a small group of partisans subordinate to the KFRA on a raid against a small border village in Korea and defeated a small Japanese police detachment. This muchcelebrated victory subsequently became the source of the Kaspan faction’s name and the beginning of Kim Il Sung’s legendary military career.
In 1939, the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA) was formed in Yanan, China, to support Mao Zedong and fought with the Chinese Communist forces in World War II and the Chinese Revolution. In April 1946, the KVA was absorbed by various area commands which ultimately evolved into the newly forming Korean Peace Preservation Corps moving into northern Korea. Eventually, even this Corps was diluted by further officer transfers and reorganizations and eventually passed out of existence. However, the legacy and history of the KVA continued to be used probably for security and morale reasons.
In 1942, Kim Il Sung commanded a company of the Soviet Far East Command’s Reconnaissance Bureau’s 88th Special Independent Sniper Brigade and received a significant amount of training and experience in his future development of special purpose forces for the KPA.
The KPA was established formally by Kim Il Sung on February 8, 1948, the day after the Fourth Session of the (NK) People’s Assembly agreed to separate the roles of the military and those of the police. The origin of the KPA certainly is rooted in the anti-Japanese guerrilla armies in general that operated under Soviet and Chinese military control. For 30 years, the KPA commemorated its birth on February 8. Then in 1978, North Korea changed the commemoration date to April 25 to correspond with the date in 1932 that Kim Il Sung allegedly organized his Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Army. By this act, Kim Il Sung was extolling the Korean-ness of the KPA, while dismissing the combined influences of the Soviets and the Chinese Communists upon the establishment of the KPA.
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